


Letters

by QuietlySomethingAlso



Category: The Last of Us
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-18
Updated: 2020-10-26
Packaged: 2021-03-04 20:08:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 44,858
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25122178
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/QuietlySomethingAlso/pseuds/QuietlySomethingAlso
Summary: A message  came out from Los Angeles: the Fireflies are coming back, and people are looking for the light again.Life in Jackson goes on, but Ellie doesn't have a place there anymore.It can't be for nothing.(Spoilers for The Last of Us Part II.)
Relationships: Dina/Ellie (The Last of Us), Ellie & JJ (The Last of Us), Ellie & Tommy (The Last of Us)
Comments: 37
Kudos: 164





	1. Nothing

**Author's Note:**

> I just want to say, I'm really flattered by all the positive reception to the first chapter. To be honest, I'm a little intimidated by just how big and active this fanbase is right now! I'm sure that everyone on earth is doing their own post-canon, what-if fic, and that there is an endless flood of this kind of story from people in this community, but I just hope that with future chapters I can continue to do something engaging that resonates with people.
> 
> Be aware: my hope is that the "canon-typical violence" tag is enough of an appropriate warning for potentially disturbing content, as The Last of Us is frequently very graphic. Nevertheless, though, I want to issue a blanket warning for all manner of potentially graphic descriptions of violence. I've refrained from using the Explicit rating, as my understanding is that it is primarily to indicate explicit sexual content, but please be aware that certain chapters may end up being quite violent or bleak.
> 
> On that note, I'm never sure how much to put in the tags and the description; there's always a line to walk between being descriptive enough to let people know if a story is for them, and holding enough back that you are still capable of being surprising. I've chosen to be reserved with this one, so I appreciate everyone checking it out and giving it a chance! I do have a number of ideas and ambitions for this fic moving forward, but I'm always looking for more feedback, and I love hearing people's thoughts. You can find me on tumblr under the same name if you want to reach out!
> 
> Thanks for reading, and I hope you enjoy.

The front page of Ellie’s journal had a list of names. With a heavy sigh, she added ‘Joel’ to the bottom of it.

She held it open over his grave. Her pen hand trembled.

It was a warm night in Jackson. Warmer than it was on the farm, anyway. She wasn’t sure if she was imagining that, but it had always seemed like Jackson had slightly warmer weather.

The suburbs were bustling. A few families were gathered out on their front porches, echoing infectious laughter down the block. It was all quiet and muted from the graveyard, though.

Ellie gave a long sigh, staring at the headstone one final time with one hand resting on the strap of her backpack. She tucked her journal back into it, and then she turned away to head further up the road. Nobody seemed to recognize her at a glance or pay her any mind, which is what she was counting on.

Soon, she found herself hovering outside the front door to one of the homes, one with an empty front porch. The lights were on inside. Ellie spent a long time standing there, deliberating, before she finally decided to pound a fist on the door.

It took a minute for anyone to respond. As a shadow closed in on the crack under the door, part of her thought about leaving before it opened. But she stayed.

When the door did open, a pair of burly arms embraced her before she even had the chance to open her mouth. “Oh, my god. Ellie.”

She returned the hug with a soft sigh. “It’s good to see you, Tommy.”

He held her tight for a minute before releasing her, leaving her standing in the doorway. Tommy had seen better days. His scarred face was a difficult reminder.

“Dina told us what you did,” he said, looking Ellie up and down with curiosity. “She got here with the baby months ago. We’ve all been prayin’ to hear from you. Are you – oh, shit; your hand…!”

Ellie’s eyes went wide, and she immediately raised her left hand to examine it. She was keeping both her hands covered with fingerless driving gloves, but, of course, it only accentuated the fact that the stubs of her two missing fingers were still clearly visible. “Oh. It’s nothing…”

Tommy scoffed. “Like hell, it’s nothing!”

“I’m _managing_ ,” she grumbled.

“Oh, Ellie.”

“Tommy, please.”

He spent a long time looking her over before settling on any proper reply. It was true that she looked rough around the edges, she knew that. But they both did. She just hoped that he would cut her some slack.

“I’ll tell you what.” He was being soft with her, softer than she had seen from him in a long time. “Why don’t you take a seat in the living room, and we can talk there? Let me make you some dinner. I can tell just from looking at you that you ain’t been getting enough to eat.”

“I’m fine. I’m eating fine. I… just…” She pinched the bridge of her nose, struggling to explain. “I have to talk to you about something. Honestly, it’s the only reason I’m here right now. Please.”

He crossed his arms, shooting her a familiar, gently scolding look, the kind he used to give to get her to pay more attention on a group patrol. “Okay, okay. I get it. Just… slow down for a minute, okay? Have a seat. I’ll make us some tea. Then we’ll talk. Alright?” He widened his eyes expectantly.

It was already more time than she wanted to spend lingering here, but that, at least, was a compromise she could manage. “…Alright.”

Taking that as a good sign, he led her out of the foyer, where she slumped onto the couch. Then he limped off to the kitchen to make tea.

Ellie folded her hands on her lap. It was like she’d gone back in time. How long had it been since she’d been here last? She couldn’t even remember. Everything looked the same. Everything in Jackson looked the same…

After a few minutes, Tommy came back from the kitchen with two cups, then took a seat opposite the coffee table from her, sliding her drink across it. She took it, though she didn’t really have much interest in drinking it.

“Listen, Ellie,” said Tommy, hardening a little, “I don’t know if somethin’ happened between you and Dina –”

“Tommy, I really, _really_ don’t want to talk about it.” She cupped her tea with both hands, slumping forward in her seat with her elbows resting on her knees.

“Okay, okay, sorry. I know, that was pushing a little too much. I…” Tommy shrugged halfheartedly. “Look, I just want to say, if you feel like I caused problems, I really am sorry for that. You know I care a lot about the both of you. I’ve said things to you that I shouldn’t have. Lord knows, Dina and I have said things to each other that shouldn’t have been said.”

Against her better judgement, Ellie, now staring at the floor, couldn’t help but ask. “She’s really pissed, huh…?”

“Well, I… I mean, look, if you don’t wanna talk about it…” He rubbed at the back of his neck.

“Yeah. Fair enough,” sighed Ellie. “Look. About what we talked about last time you came up to the farm. That’s actually what I’m here to talk about now. I really don’t want to waste any more time. You have to understand something.”

“You sound like you’ve got quite a story to tell.”

“Yeah, I guess I do.” She set down her teacup. This was it – she’d been rehearsing in her head for weeks what she’d say to him now, and yet she still found herself struggling. “I’ve been thinking a lot about Joel lately. You’re the only one who truly felt the same way I did when he died. And, I mean, you were his _brother_. I didn’t know him like you did. You knew him better than _anyone_. So, you deserve to be told the truth.” Her hand ran nervously up her tattooed arm, bottom lip trembling. She couldn’t look at him. Nevertheless, she managed to mumble out, “I didn’t do it, Tommy.”

Rather than anger, the first thing on his face was concern. His warmth immediately caught her off-guard. “Ellie… it’s okay, sweetheart.” He leaned in to rest a hand reassuringly on her shoulder, which made her recoil. “You did _everything_ you could. You hunted her across the country; that’s not a failure. Take a breath; take care of yourself. Slow down. We don’t have to find her right away. We’ll get another lead, no matter how long it takes; we don’t have to –”

That explained it.

“No, goddammit, no! Listen to me. You don’t understand.” Exasperated, she threw her hands in front of her face, struggling to find the strength to say it outright. “I found her. Okay? I found Abby.” She closed her eyes. “I didn’t kill her.”

Tommy went silent as he processed that. “…What…?”

“You’re right; I hunted her across the country. All the way to Santa Barbara.” She tugged up on the side of her shirt with a huff, revealing the relatively fresh, occasionally still-aching scar along her side. “And it almost killed me, but I found her. Her and the kid she was traveling with.” She lowered her shirt again and leaned forward with her elbows on her knees. She was finally finding the confidence now to make eye contact. “You’re the _one_ other person in the world who truly felt the way I did after Joel died. And I know I don’t have any right to tell you what to do now. If you still want to track her down… well, the last I saw of her, she was heading, by boat, what I think is southwest from the coast of Santa Barbara. But I’m here to ask you not to.” She raised a hand before he could protest. “Please. _Please_. This has gone on for too fucking long. It’s time for it to end, Tommy. I’m pleading with you. Let’s just bury it. Right here, tonight. I just want it to end. Nobody else has to die.”

Now the anger. Above that, the disbelief. “…I can’t believe… you, of all people…” He stared into her eyes, struggling to understand.

He looked betrayed.

“I’m sorry to do this to you,” she whispered.

“You’ve been through a lot. You’re tired. You’re not thinking straight.”

“Tommy, hear me when I say this: for the first time in as long as I can remember, my head is completely, crystal fucking clear.” Ellie looked him in the eye, pleading.

The silence that followed was weighty. It was still setting in for him. He was staring like he didn’t recognize her.

“You really mean this.” It was less of a question, and more of a realization. “You hunted Abby all the way down there, and then you didn’t go through with it…”

Ellie shook her head, fidgeting with her hands. “I know it isn’t what you want to hear –”

“Don’t give me that. It’s _wrong_. You are the only person that could have done this for us. And don’t you tell me I can still do it myself, because you know full well that I can’t. You made a promise, and now you’re breakin’ it,” he scoffed. “…She do that to your hand?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“The _fuck_ do you mean, it doesn’t matter? How can – after everything we went through to…?”

Tommy threw up his hands in frustration. He was talking past her; it was clear that her mind was already made up.

“Let me ask you something,” Ellie said with a deep groan. “That kid she’s traveling with –”

“I don’t give a damn about some kid –”

“Are we gonna kill him, too? Is that who we are?” She already knew the answer, of course.

Tommy gritted his teeth. “You know that ain’t fair.”

“Okay. Fine. So we’re gonna kill Abby, and we’re gonna leave him alive. So what do we do five years from now when he shows up in Jackson looking for _fucking_ revenge?” She opened her hands. “What if he gets his hands on Maria? What if he – what if he finds Dina? What if he finds JJ? What then?”

“Oh, for – you’re catastrophizing. That isn’t going to happen. Ellie, you have to understand; it’s not…”

“And you’re telling me _I’m_ the one not thinking straight.”

“Fuckin’ unbelievable. _Unbelievable_. We went to hell and back, and now all of a sudden you want to let that fucking murderer get away with what she did. Hell, forget Joel; she took Jesse from us, too. You really want to –?” That one was really accusatory. He was pushing her buttons on purpose, and the limits of her patience, at that.

“This isn’t _about_ Jesse.” She couldn’t help but interrupt him now.

“Isn’t it? Listen to me, Ellie; this is not the time to start –”

“No, _you_ listen to _me_! You’re not the one that hunted her down; _I_ am. I’ve been through more for this than _anyone_. That _has_ to count for something.”

“You _would_ think that. Even though I couldn’t go out after her myself because of what _she_ fuckin’ did to me!” He jabbed a finger roughly against his scarred face. “What, are you upset because Dina came back to Jackson without you? She shouldn’t even be a part of the goddamn discussion; she never had the fucking stomach –”

“Oh, don’t you _dare_ start attacking her! If you don’t want her to be a part of the discussion, then leave her out of it. She didn’t do anything wrong.”

“Well, then, what in the hell are you so upset about?” he spat. “Oh, and by the way? About Dina? She blames _me_ for what happened. For you leavin’, and all that shit. You know what she said to me? She told me she’s afraid to let me near the baby. Like I’m a goddamn _monster_.” He threw his hand out furiously to the side. Whatever sensitivity he’d been trying to show to her before was gone. Apparently, he’d been carrying more on his shoulders than Ellie realized. “The shit we did in Seattle? That was all of us. You and me, we were in it together. That’s what I thought when I told you where to find her. I thought we were in it together. Now you’re giving me that same cowardly, apathetic bullshit that Dina gave me.”

There was a vulnerability cracking through his anger. Tommy huffed through his nostrils, waiting for Ellie to retaliate, but she simply fell back into the couch and pinched the bridge of her nose, looking away again.

She was losing the energy to fight. She barely had the energy to talk.

“Trust me; she doesn’t blame you, Tommy. And if she says she does, she shouldn’t. Leaving was my choice. She knows that.”

He lowered his eyes, put off by her muted reaction. “Yeah, well, you haven’t been the one talkin’ to her.”

They lingered on that for a minute.

Ellie, now staring at the ceiling, closed her eyes for a brief moment, and then slid forward in her chair to reach behind her. “I can’t do this anymore, Tommy. I don’t care if you forgive me. I just wanted you to know the truth. That’s why I’m here.”

Her hand was already digging around in a pocket of her backpack. Her fingers caught a sharp piece of glass, and she wrapped her hand around it, pulling it out with a heavy frown.

Joel’s watch. Tommy’s eyes went wide.

“Here.” She extended it to him, and he hesitated at the sight. “I think you should have it,” she mumbled.

After a moment’s thought, he took it from her, scratching at his beard with his other hand. Ellie watched him patiently for a reaction, which took him a while.

“I was there when it happened, you know. On outbreak night,” he said quietly, staring at it in his palm. “You should have seen him there. Crying, shakin’ on the ground, holdin’ Sarah in his arms. That girl was his whole world. It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to watch. I still get nightmares about it.” He traced his thumb over the face of the watch, nodding stubbornly to himself. “You’re right. You didn’t know him like I did.”

Ellie had no response to that. A lump formed in her throat.

Tommy shifted uncertainly in his seat. The watch, he closed in his hand, frowning stubbornly.

Neither wanted to speak.

And before either of them could, someone new interrupted them. A soft voice from the doorway. “Tommy? I was around back, but I heard yelling. What are you…?”

Ellie looked up with a start to see Maria standing there.

Maria, after a brief glance at Tommy, turned to Ellie with equal shock. “What – Ellie?” She immediately stepped inside to approach, and she kneeled to give a proper hug. “I can’t believe it…”

“Maria… I didn’t know you guys were…” Ellie returned the hug with one hand, shooting a slow, disoriented glance back and forth between the pair of them.

“Yeah. For a little over a month, now…” Maria raised an eyebrow suspiciously in Tommy’s direction. “What were you guys talking about?”

“Nothing. Not a goddamn thing,” he said gruffly, shoving up off his chair. “You two go ahead and catch up. I’m gonna take a walk. I’ll be back later.” He stuffed Joel’s watch into his pocket, brushing past the pair of them to head for the front door.

As he left, his eyes lingered on Ellie’s, as though one last glance would give him some kind of new insight into what she was thinking.

It didn’t.

Maria nearly moved to stop him, but decided against it after a glance at Ellie. She was cradling her hands, lip trembling, staring at the floor. Even without having to overhear anything specific, it was clear that there was nothing left to resolve between the two of them.

The front door slammed shut from the hall outside, and Maria took the spot where Tommy had been sitting.

She studied the younger woman with bleak curiosity. “Are you doing okay?”

It had been almost a year since the two had actually met face-to-face. It felt like longer.

It took Ellie a while to reply, unmoving, mumbling, “I just needed to talk to Tommy.”

Maria’s eyes drifted downward. “Ellie, your hand…”

“It’s nothing.”

“You look exhausted. Why don’t you take the guest room tonight? Get out of your clothes and get some sleep. We can talk about it in the morning.”

She shook her head without looking up. “I’m sorry. I can’t stay…”

“It isn’t any trouble. I can talk to Tommy. I’ll sort him out, I promise.”

“It’s not about Tommy.” Her eyes fluttered shut for a moment. “I need to go. I can’t – I can’t stay in Jackson. Oh, god…”

Her voice broke before she finished speaking, and her left hand shot to her eyes to cover them so she could keep herself stable enough to hold tears back. She felt Maria’s arms wrap around her neck before she opened them again.

“Ellie… oh, honey.”

“Thanks…” Ellie’s voice cracked.

Despite her best efforts, tears streaked down her cheeks. The effort not to cry was making her shudder, and Maria hugged her more tightly in response.

“What did Tommy say to you?” she demanded. “I’ll talk to him. He… he’s just lashing out. He lashed out against me, too, at first. After Seattle.”

With a sniffle, Ellie pushed herself from Maria and waved her off, wiping her eyes with the back of her other hand. “It’s nothing. He has a right to be upset with me. I’m just… tired.”

“I heard him mention Dina.” Maria was stone-faced as she settled onto the couch beside her.

“Yeah,” Ellie murmured. She sniffled again, hands retreating to her lap where she could fidget with them. “…How… um… how is she?”

A little surprised by the question, Maria mulled it over for a second, lips pursed. “Uh, good. She’s doing well. She’s, uh, staying in a house up on Kelly Avenue, close to Jesse’s parents. JJ’s been spending a lot of time with them, so, needless to say, Robin’s very happy about that arrangement.”

“Oh, that’s… uh, I’m glad to hear that. Thanks.” She rubbed at her forearm. “Would you please tell her I’m safe, and I’m doing okay? I don’t want her to worry.”

“Ellie… I think she’d really rather hear it from you.”

“Please just do this for me.”

They exchanged a glance. Ellie’s expression was severe – there was clearly no negotiating to be done on that subject.

And so, Maria relented, though she did let out a sigh to note her disapproval. “Alright. First thing in the morning. I’ll start spreading the word around town. Everyone would like to hear about how you’re doing, not just Dina.”

“Okay. Thank you.”

They looked each other over again. Ellie leaned against the arm of the couch, staring at her fingernails, and Maria studied her, thoughtful.

“Look…” she started, hesitant, “I know I don’t have to tell you this, but there’s a place for you here. We’re your family, and we’re all here for you.”

“I know. I care about you guys. I just need to be on my own for a while.” Ellie closed her hand and opened it again, watching her fingers flex out in front of her. “I have to figure some things out. I’m never going to be able to do that if I stay here. I couldn’t do it at the farm. To be honest, I couldn’t even do it when I was living here, before Joel died.”

Maria nodded along, not that she really fully understood. That was okay; Ellie didn’t really expect her to.

“Where are you going to go?” Maria asked.

“South, I think. I’m not sure yet.”

Ellie scratched her chin and looked over her shoulder to peer out the living room window. Things were starting to quiet down outside, now. No sign of Tommy.

“Do you need any gear? I could let you go with one of the horses.”

“I’m okay. I already pared my pack down. I’ve got a couple guns; don’t need to be weighed down. And I’m gonna go on foot. The horses always die on long trips. I still feel bad about Shimmer.”

“Well, I trust your judgement.”

Ellie smiled superficially, just to be nice. Her mind was elsewhere. She stared out the window for a minute or two, tugging on the strap of her backpack with one hand. It still didn’t feel quite real to be in Jackson. Everything felt so unnaturally calm and quiet.

“Please stay tonight,” pleaded Maria, after a pause. “Just for one night. For me. Head out in the morning, when you’re rested.”

No more debating. “…Okay. Just for tonight.”

Ellie didn’t look away from the window. With a sigh, she leaned her head on her palm, and Maria slid further over on the couch to look over her shoulder for a moment.

“It’s a pretty night, huh?”

“Yeah.” Ellie drummed her fingers on her chin. “Won’t be long now that you guys start getting snow. Man, the kids love it when it starts snowing…”

“That’s for sure. Patrols get tough, though.”

“Yeah…”

Maria placed a hand on Ellie’s shoulder, and, finally, drew her attention, flashing a look of motherly concern that only she could earnestly give.

“We don’t want to lose you, Ellie. Do whatever it is you feel like you need to do; just… make sure you come home safe, okay?”

“I will.” Ellie looked Maria dead in the eye. “I promise.”

* * *

**Six months later.**

One thumb traced over the stubs of the two missing fingers.

There was a little cabin in the woods nearly fifty miles out of Grand Junction, all alone along the edge of a shallow lake. A plank was missing from the ceiling in a few places. A bucket underneath collected the rainwater that had leaked in that morning. For what it was, it was a pretty nice place, though it could use a carpenter.

Ellie searched the place with a hand on her belt. The walls were bare, and the potted plants were dead, but someone was definitely squatting here, and recently.

A narrow, decrepit hallway led into a small, one-person bedroom, complete with an unmade twin bed. There wasn’t much to this place, but one glance at the desk still drew her interest enough to keep investigating. A little food, a little alcohol, and medicine – lots of it, several bottles’ worth. She kept her eyes peeled as she shoveled it into her pack. Following the usual method, she opened the drawers one at a time and scanned for valuables, but each was empty. Each until the drawer nearest the bed.

Inside it was an organized stack of papers. Notes, on closer inspection, neatly addressed to someone. ‘Emily’.

Ellie narrowed her eyes.

_Emily,_

_Something strange happened to me today._

_I was out in the garden, and I found myself whistling this song I didn’t recognize. Then I realized it was that dumb thing you used to sing to drive your dad crazy. The one that always got stuck in his head, that he would complain constantly about._

_He has that dry wit, but ever since Felicia, he was always rather serious with me. For a long time, you brought a certain whimsy that I think we lose sight of as adults. That’s when I miss you most, when I realize how cold I’ve gotten._

…It went on like that for a while.

“Ay yi yi… sorry, pal. Yeesh…”

With a pensive frown, she pulled out her journal from her backpack, adding ‘Emily’ to the bottom of her list of names.

One hand grazed over the letters in the drawer. Emily, Emily, Emily. One was just addressed to ‘Sweetheart’. There had to be two dozen of them.

Her gaze drifted back to the letter on top. She flipped it over, skimming through the last few paragraphs.

_I talked to some traders that came down from the city. I didn’t have much to offer, but a look at their supplies got me thinking. I think maybe I’ll start growing some grapes next spring. Fresh grapes, you’d absolutely love them. Fresh fruit is so hard to come by on the road._

_I don’t mean to prattle on. I know I have a tendency to do that, especially when I get lost in thought, which I always do when I’m writing these._

_I just want you to know I’m thinking about you, as always._

_It’s all quiet here for the time being._

_That’s all I’ve got for_

Someone was in the doorway. Ellie’s hand was on her pistol before the fact even really registered, and she whipped around to point it at them before they could react.

“Hands in the fucking air. I will shoot. Don’t test me.”

It was an old man. Hair gray, face wrinkled, cheeks sagging. Jacket oversized, like he’d pulled it from a corpse twice his size.

“It’s okay. They’re in the air.” He was clearly just as surprised to see her as she was to see him, and his hands trembled with a sudden, disoriented fear as he raised them over his head.

Ellie tightened her grip over her gun with both hands. “Who are you?”

“Benjamin. Uh, Ben. That’s – this is my house. I live here.” He sighed under his breath. His eyes were low. He expected to die – Ellie knew the look. “Is it okay if I ask who _you_ are?” Getting no response, he craned his neck down slightly, trying to look her in the eye, but she ducked his gaze. “I see you took the pills I had on the counter there. Those are for my heart. I need those to survive. I know I’m not in a position to bargain, but if it means anything to you, they are a lot more valuable for me than they are – ”

“–Okay, okay, Jesus.” Her bad hand released the gun to reach back into her backpack, pulling the medicine haphazardly out of the back pocket and tossing it back onto the desk. She never looked away. “I didn’t know anyone was living here. I don’t need your… heart pills. I thought the place was abandoned.”

He nodded graciously, hands still raised. “Thank you. That’s very kind.”

“What’s your name, again? Ben, you said?”

“That’s right.” He lowered one of his hands very slightly to gesture toward her, the other still quivering above his head. “Could you – would you mind lowering your gun?”

“Nice fucking try.”

She didn’t flinch. The sights were still trained on his chest, unwavering.

After a moment of tense silence, Ben spoke again. “I’m sorry. I’m… really not sure what I should do here.”

“Backpack and coat off. Kick the backpack over to me. Stand in the corner with your hands on your head.”

“I don’t have a gun on me. I promise I’m not dangerous.”

“Dude. Just take off the damn backpack.”

“Okay, okay…”

His movements were a little slow and labored from age, but he did as she said, shuffling awkwardly over to the corner of the bedroom and hunching over to place his backpack on the floor. He slid his pack and his coat over at the same time, and Ellie took a step forward to pull them in with her foot. Under the baggy jacket, all he had on was a tank top, and the sight of his bony bare arms made him look even older, somehow.

“Weapons in the coat?” she asked, kneeling to sift through it with one hand. Her hand still stayed raised, and she was careful not to take her eyes off him for more than a second or two at a time.

“I told you,” he emphasized, somewhat impatiently, “I don’t have a gun on me.”

“Yeah, I’ll believe that when I fucking see it – you were wandering around outside with no gun?”

“I didn’t feel I needed one.”

“You ‘didn’t feel’ you needed a gun? By yourself? Out here in the middle of nowhere? What if you got jumped by infected or something?”

“That’s never happened to me before just checking my snares. It’s just a short walk. Infected almost never wander this far out.”

For as hard as that story was to swallow, neither his coat nor his backpack seemed to have weapons of any kind. All Ellie could find with a search was fresh vegetables, not even so much as a knife.

“So you just… don’t have a gun?” she asked, standing from his backpack with an eyebrow raised.

He shook his head. “No, no, of course I _have_ one… I keep it in my safe. Just in case.”

“In your safe. Right. Oh, my god… yeah, I’m sure a clicker would be happy to wait around for you to get your safe open before biting you.”

He sighed audibly this time. “Like I said, I don’t _get_ infected up by the house. And if I really needed to protect myself, I have a bat by the door.”

“A baseball bat? That’s all, for real? That is a pretty stupid move, man.”

“Yes, it’s starting to feel like it…” He trailed off toward the end there, like he was afraid of irritating her. “Um. Can I ask your name?”

Ellie didn’t look up. “What do you need to know my name for?”

“I don’t. I just… while you’re here in my house, going through my things… I thought it would be nice to know what I should call you.”

“Tsch.” She thought it over. That was probably fair enough; she _had_ gone through most of his belongings by now. “Ellie.”

“Ellie. That’s a lovely name. It’s good to meet you, Ellie.” He stared down the barrel of her pistol, unsure of whether to continue on or not. “You know… I had a granddaughter, born a handful of years after the outbreak. She’d probably be about your age now.”

Distracted, she nodded along, kicking his coat back along the floor. “Yeah? What was her name?”

“I see that you read my letters.” He gestured with his head toward the overturned stack in the open drawer beside her. “‘Emily’.”

“Right. So you’re writing letters to your dead granddaughter?”

Ben lowered his head. “It’s something I do to cope.”

Strikingly, it almost pained him to say it. Like he’d been doing it for so long that it was uncomfortable to admit out loud that the letters were for his own benefit. Something about that gave Ellie pause.

“I’ve seen people doing that before. I don’t know.” She took a breath, straightening out her gun in her hands. “Does… does it help?”

Ben nodded uncertainly. “I think… sometimes it helps to put things into words. How I’m feeling. It helps me think about how she would have felt.”

“I, uh.” She shrugged. “I write songs. Sometimes. Like, to cope, I mean.”

“That’s nice. That’s a really nice thing. Creative…”

“Yeah.”

Ben glanced at her eyes momentarily. Ellie had lost focus for half a second, but her finger was still resting on the trigger. He was trembling with fear, still very much aware that she could take his life at any second.

The absurdity of it only hit her a few moments later, and even then it took her a few more seconds to lower the gun. “God…”

“Thank you. You were making me nervous.” Ben very slowly lowered his hands, straightening out his tank top with a little dignified sigh. “I know it can be difficult to trust strangers. I’ve had bad experiences, too. But I promise, I’m just living alone out here. Trying to mind my own business.”

She muttered something under her breath to herself, buttoning the strap of her pistol’s holster with a shake of her head. She ignored what he was saying.

Getting nothing, he awkwardly stood around for another few moments before offering, “Where are you from, Ellie? If you don’t mind me asking?”

“Uh… further north.” She crossed her arms, eyes narrowing. “Let’s just ease up on the personal questions.”

“That’s fine. I don’t mean to make you uncomfortable.”

“Uh huh.”

Ben headed slowly over toward his desk, which she’d picked clean, and leaned back against it, gesturing with one hand to his backpack full of vegetables. “I take it you’re looking for supplies. I have food to spare, if you’re interested. I don’t know if you saw my garden out back, but I’ve been doing my own canning, and my stores are full from the winter. Things can get cold in the mountains, so you may want to stock up. You won’t regret it.”

“Yeah… I’m good, thanks.”

“Are you sure? You can always use more food.”

“I’m sure. Stop trying to cozy up to me.”

Too much. She shot him a harsh glare.

“I’m sorry. I’m not trying to ‘cozy up’ to you. I just haven’t talked to anyone in a while,” he admitted. “…Forgive me for saying, but you seem a little on-edge. Do you… do you have a camp, or a group to go back to?”

Ellie raised an eyebrow. “Do _you_?”

“It’s just me out here, I’m afraid.”

“Well. Same here.” Her eyes shot to the side. “I’m alone.”

He brushed past her as he made his way to the desk, eyes lingering on the open drawer of his letters. With nowhere else to go, Ellie awkwardly shuffled backwards to get out of the way, almost tripping over his belongings on the floor.

“You searched my jacket, right? Do you mind if I put it back on? It’s a bit drafty.” He was already starting to lean over to grab it.

She rolled her eyes. “Go ahead.”

With a heavy breath, Ben lowered himself to his knees, reaching out for his jacket and dusting it off. He had to be almost seventy; it was pretty rare to see someone his age at all, let alone living by himself out in the middle of nowhere. It was strange to watch, she thought. He was so skinny, even a little frail. He looked like someone who wasn’t fighting just to survive. Or, perhaps more accurately, someone who wasn’t able to.

Her eyes traced the back of his neck. His shoulders were broad, but bony. Just above the shoulder blade, there was a scar she hadn’t noticed yet. No, not a scar. A wound, stained with dried blood around the bottom edge.

Ellie’s eyes suddenly went wide. A bite mark. Instantly recognizable.

“Hey, your shoulder…” She murmured that almost inaudibly as she took a step closer, towering over him. “What… what is…?” Without asking, she grabbed him there, adjusting him to get a close look at the teeth marks in his skin. “…Oh, shit…”

“What? My shoulder? What are you…?” Perplexed, he struggled to his feet again, stumbling back into the desk and reaching a hand behind him to feel at the bare skin. “What…? I don’t…” He shot a look at her again for confirmation. “ _What_?”

“Y- you…” She was already raising her gun again, hands shaking. “When did… when were you bitten?”

“B- bitten?”

“Goddammit…”

His whole expression changed in an instant. “Bitten…? That… that’s not possible…”

“It’s…” Ellie’s hand started to shake, but she steadied herself quickly. “I… I’m sorry… but…”

“No, no… I mean, that _literally_ isn’t possible.” He felt desperately at the back of his shoulder until his fingers pressed over the indent, his eyes going wide with shock. “I… I haven’t run into a single infected in almost a week… everyone turns within two days or less, right? There’s simply no way…”

His eyes raked over her face as though trying to parse a lie. He sincerely seemed to believe there was no way it could be happening, enough to give Ellie a moment of genuine pause.

She slowly lowered her gun into its holster again. “…Did you say a _week_?”

“Yes, I… I mean, the last time I saw an infected was when I got attacked down further down along one of the creeks maybe five or six days ago. I had to wrestle one off of me, but I didn’t feel any bites. I’m sure I would have noticed. And that’s the last time I saw any infected. I swear on my life…”

His face sank as he clutched at his skin. That look was returning to him. The fear of death.

She opened her mouth, then closed it again. “Do you… what, do you have Alzheimer’s or something?”

“What? No, of course not.”

“Maybe you don’t remember it. Maybe – maybe you – ”

“My memory is just fine! I didn’t _forget_ being bitten!” he retaliated, incredulous. “Could it… I mean, could it have not gone deep enough? Maybe the bite wasn’t enough to transmit the –”

“No. That doesn’t happen. If it was deep enough to draw blood, it was deep enough to infect you.”

“Maybe… I mean… I ran into, a… a coyote? Two days ago? I didn’t notice _it_ bite me, either, but –”

“It’s not a fucking coyote, okay? I know what an infected bite looks like. Those teeth marks. Unless you got bitten by a human being for some reason, that’s an infected. Jesus…”

“Well… you’re the first person I’ve seen in weeks…”

They stared at each other. Ellie’s heart was pounding out of her chest. Her head was running through her list of names now. She stroked her right arm without thinking.

“Fuck…” she breathed.

“Oh, my god… oh, my god…” Ben steadied himself on the desk, trying not to hyperventilate. His hand kept grasping at the back of his shoulder, like that would change anything.

“Fuck.” She kicked the backpack on the ground, knocking a tomato out of it. “ _Fuck_!”

“I don’t know… I don’t know what to… oh, god…”

Ellie clenched her fist tight enough to make it sting. She didn’t take her eyes off of him, but she wandered over to his bed to slump down onto it, taking a seat just to catch her breath. Somewhere out there, Dina was laughing at her.

“I’m going to say something. I need you to listen. Okay?” Ellie asked.

“I don’t want to turn.” His face was bleak.

“No.”

“Please… I don’t want to be –”

“No! Shut the fuck up! Agh!” Her blood was pumping in her ears. She pressed a hand to her forehead, just trying to buy a little more time to think. “No. No! Wait.” One hand shot to the other to peel the glove off. “Here. H – here. Just look.”

Her bare left hand was raised. There was a small bite mark on the side of it, now coarse and callused. Hard to notice at first, but definitely there.

“I got this almost nine months ago. Nine _months_. And it wasn’t even the first time I’ve been bitten.” She touched the mark with her right hand.

Ben nodded along, but he was lost in thought. He stared at Ellie’s bite mark like it couldn’t be real, a reaction she’d seen before.

“I’m sorry…” he mumbled. “I… I don’t…”

“I’m saying I’m immune.” Ellie was careful to be very clear about that.

He paused. “Immune. Immune… to…?”

“Yeah.”

“I… really…?”

“Really. I swear to god.” She took a deep breath and pressed her tongue to the inside of her cheek. “And… I don’t know; I mean, maybe you… maybe that’s why you…”

Her eyes were wide open. Her fingers trailed her tattooed arm over and over again, shaking.

“I just… even if I am… I don’t know, _immune_ …” Ben continued, flustered. “I just don’t know… I mean, what does that _mean_?”

She’d been going through her list of names in her head for months. She just wanted it written down somewhere. Like that was confirmation that it meant something.

_Riley_

_Joel_

Ellie’s mind went back to Jackson.

Then she looked at Ben, whose whole expression had changed again. His eyes kept drifting to the mark on her left hand. He was waiting on her.

She opened her mouth and closed it again.

_Emily_


	2. Fifty-Two Hours

Ellie pushed her bangs out of her eyes. Her hair had begun to grow long again, hanging down over her shoulders, so she’d tied it back. The last time she’d properly styled it, Dina had been the one to cut it for her. That feeling kept coming back to her: the fingers caressing the back of her neck, playing with her hair. Dina’s face in the mirror over her shoulder, making eye contact in the reflection. Warm, and pretty, and patient, and completely absorbed in her.

She’d been trying to draw that image for hours, filling three pages in her journal with the sketches. Their faces in the bathroom mirror. Dina, she’d had lots of experience drawing, but herself? She crossed out the eyes.

Ben’s kitchen table sat next to a little window that let the late afternoon sun into the front room of the cabin. She’d been sitting there with her journal open for hours, drifting off, absentmindedly working on the drawing. Her pen tapped rhythmically on the open page, and slowly her eyes drifted from the paper, to her hand, to the tattoos on her arm, to the chemical burn on the underside of it.

A door opened at the other end of the house, and Ellie snapped to attention, tossing her journal face-down, shoving out of her chair, and grabbing the shotgun she had leaned against the wall.

“It’s okay! It’s just me. I’m still… me.” Ben emerged from the hallway with a hand raised, lumbering into the kitchen with heavy, creaky steps.

Ellie peered down the barrel of the shotgun until she saw him, then lowered it. With a sigh, she fell back into her chair, cupping a hand around the barrel and resting the stock against the floor.

He tucked his hands into his pockets at the sight of her, glancing at the journal on the table but not addressing it. “I was just taking a nap. I… how long has it been by now?” he asked with a yawn.

She rubbed a hand over her face. “Fifty-two hours.” For as spacey as she was, she’d still kept perfect track. Of course she had. “Fifty-two since we _found_ the bite, that is. It’s anyone’s guess how long since you actually got it.”

“And you really think…?”

“I don’t see any other explanation.”

They looked each other in the eye. They’d both had time to come to terms with it – it had been clear for a while now that Ben wasn’t going to turn – but they had yet to really talk about it.

“I didn’t even know it was _possible_ for people to be immune,” said Ben. He took a seat across from her at the table, folding his hands in front of him as he settled in.

She drummed a finger on the barrel of the shotgun in her hand, not facing him. “Neither did I, until it happened to me.”

“So, what did _you_ do? When you found out?”

Ellie thought about that for a moment. It wasn’t something she was usually keen to share, but then, these weren’t ordinary circumstances. “Well, when _I_ found out, I was fourteen, and I was stuck in a military academy in a quarantine zone. I didn’t have any control over anything.” She shrugged. “Uh, this… friend of mine. A woman who was looking after me. She had me smuggled out of the city so I could join up with the Fireflies. They were… researching. Trying to develop a vaccine.”

“I suppose it’s safe to assume that didn’t happen.”

“Shit went sideways.”

It was obvious that Ellie didn’t want to talk about it, but Ben wasn’t bothered by it one way or the other. He was more distracted by the idea as a whole.

“A vaccine…” he mumbled, head shaking gently with disbelief.

“Yeah. I know.” She studied his reaction carefully. “Listen, I was thinking… you had a granddaughter. So…”

“So…?”

“So. You must have a kid. Right?”

He hesitated. “A son. Andrew.”

“Well. I mean. Is he…?”

“…He’s alive, if that’s what you’re asking,” Ben replied, rather gruffly. “As far as I know. I haven’t seen him in years.”

“Okay, well. If he’s a blood relative, doesn’t that mean he might be immune, too?”

Ben widened his eyes. Apparently he hadn’t thought of that. “You tell me. Is that how it works?”

“I dunno. But it makes sense to me.”

“Was one of your parents immune?”

“No clue.” She clicked her tongue. “Emily… I know this is a hard question, but… how did she die? If that’s not too personal?"

It was most definitely too personal. The question made him recoil.

Still, he answered it, albeit tentatively. “Ah. Uh… an accident.”

There was no reason to push him on it, Ellie figured. “So, you mean… not an infected, then?”

“No.”

“I was just thinking,” she said, drumming her fingers on the table, “if she never got infected, then…”

“Then we can’t rule out the possibility that I may have passed on my immunity.”

“Exactly.” She flattened her hand out and shot a sharp, hopeful look up at him. “Ben… what if there are more people like us?”

“…I don’t know.” Ben sighed under his breath. “What if there _are_?”

It was a heavy question. But Ellie knew how to respond. There was something she’d had been holding onto for a long time, having no idea what to do with. Saying it out loud, and making it real, scared her a little.

She cupped her hands. “Did you hear about Los Angeles?”

“What’s in Los Angeles?”

“A transmission came out a couple months ago. They’re saying the Fireflies are regrouping, and they have a base of operations there. They’re looking for recruits. Apparently FEDRA is _not_ happy about it.”

“Well, that’s no surprise. The Fireflies, huh…?” Something about hearing that seemed to give him pause, for whatever reason. “So, you’re thinking, maybe there are people researching a vaccine there?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. Last year, I found an ex-Firefly in Santa Barbara – LA must have been where she was headed. My guess is, they’ve been collecting people behind the scenes for a long time now. Probably at least a year.” She shrugged with one hand. “It’s just a thought.”

Ben considered that, apprehensive. “…Well. You asked about my son. If the Fireflies are regrouping, that’s where he’ll be.” Ben gritted his teeth as he thought about it. “He was one of them.”

Clearly, he wasn’t happy it, but it felt like there was some kind of personal sting to saying that.

Ellie’s reaction was muted. “I thought you haven’t talked to him in years?”

“I haven’t.”

“Then what makes you so sure he’d go back to the Fireflies?”

“He was… eh… a true believer. He was a friend of their leader, this woman named Marlene. He and his wife both were. They wanted to save the world. They did some things I didn’t agree with. And Felicia – that’s my daughter-in-law – she gave her life for their cause.”

“You mean, they were doing Firefly shit. Bombings, and killing soldiers. And FEDRA killed her for it.”

“…Yes.”

“Yeah. That sounds like FEDRA.” She hung her head low for a moment. “I’m sorry.”

He nodded to acknowledge the sentiment, but he didn’t dwell on it. “After that, Andrew would have gladly sacrificed himself for the Fireflies. And if he heard that they were regrouping, there’s no doubt in my mind that that’s where he’d go, no matter the risks.”

He explained it with a weighty gravitas, as something more inevitable than admirable.

The Fireflies. Every memory Ellie had of them was swimming through her head at once.

The beam of sun shining in through the window cast over Ben’s face. The dust from the kitchen flitted in and out of view inside it. Suddenly, Ellie felt acutely aware of the fact that they, surrounded by acres of forest on all sides, were the only two people anywhere for miles.

She spoke before she even really knew what she was saying.

“LA’s not that far.”

They exchanged a glance. Ben was at a loss for words. Ellie, sober and intense, was not.

Getting no response, she threw up her hands. “Couple months, we could get there on foot.”

Ben shook his head. “Ellie…”

“I mean it. You and me. It’s an easy trip. We’ll find the Fireflies, and we’ll find Andrew.”

“I can’t just up and leave.”

“Why the hell not? What’s so important that you need to stay here for?”

There was real passion in her voice all of a sudden. Her harsh, expectant glare caught him by surprise.

“I’m an old man,” he replied with a shrug. “My traveling days are behind me. I’m happy here. I have some peace here. I don’t think I…”

It was an earnest confession. She scoffed at it. “What a weak fucking excuse.”

The legs of her chair scraped unpleasantly against the wood floor as she shoved her seat back. She hunched over, and her hair hung over her eyes as her head fell lower.

Ben, apparently not too bothered by her comment, simply responded with, “Can I ask you something?”

She was especially terse in the reply she grunted out. “Fine.”

“If you feel so strongly about this, why didn’t you go looking for the Fireflies sooner? That isn’t what you were doing when you came here, right?”

“I didn’t know if the Fireflies were even still _around_.”

“But you said the transmission from Los Angeles came out months ago. Why didn’t you go then? Why now?”

It was a fair question. And he seemed to be sincerely curious, patient with her despite her accusatory tone.

Ellie’s hair was tickling the back of her neck, itching.

She stared at her chemical burn again. “…I’ve spent the last seven years of my life wondering whether I was the only immune person on the planet.” She looked up. “Now, I know I’m not. Just like that.”

“And that changes things for you?”

She narrowed her eyes. Truthfully, worryingly, she had no idea what her answer to that question was.

“…Look,” she grumbled. “We’re both alone. We have nowhere to go. We have nothing to lose.” She clutched her left hand with her right, running her fingers over the spot where her glove covered her bite mark. “We should both be dead right now. So, why aren’t we?”

Ben frowned, confused by the question. “I don’t know. I guess we’re lucky.”

“Yeah,” she snickered humorlessly. “Lucky.” Out of the corner of her eye, she glanced at her bracelet.

Both of Ellie’s hands rested on the table. Her eyes drifted up again to the back cover of her journal, and she picked at her fingernails.

Then she let out a sigh. “Aren’t you sick of how… how fucking horrible the whole world is? I think about it every time I kill an infected. They’re just… sick people. This is just how things _are_ for us.” After a second to let him sit on that, she raised a hand again, pointing right at him. “You were born before the outbreak, right? I mean… don’t you _miss_ it?”

Ben seemed to genuinely consider it, even though he already knew what his answer was. “The world has changed. I’m sorry to say this, Ellie, but vaccine or not, there’s nothing we can do about that.”

Her expression was stony. “But that’s not what your son thinks, right?”

That took him completely aback. He nearly protested, but abruptly stopped himself. “No. It isn’t,” he murmured.

In the silence that followed, Ellie reached for her journal again and flipped it over. Ben raised his eyebrows at the sight of her sketches from earlier, but before he could get a good look, she flipped back to the first page and scribbled another name at the bottom of her list. ‘Felicia’, this time.

Ben frowned. “Who… who is that you’ve been drawing?”

Ellie paused for a moment, pen raised from the page, and looked him in the eye. He was meek, now, still thinking about what she said. Something snapped in her.

With a loud huff, she stood up from her seat, threw her backpack onto the table, and stuffed her journal inside it. “Fuck it.”

“What?”

She didn’t look up from her backpack, except to reach back for her shotgun and affix it to the outside. “You’re right; I should have done this months ago. I don’t have any excuse.”

“Ellie.”

“Forget it. I’ll do it by myself. Enjoy your garden.”

“Ellie, wait.”

“I’ve been waiting here for two days. I’m done fucking waiting.”

“Just give me one second. _Ellie_.” He leaned slightly in, struggling for her attention. “What if I told you I could get us a car?”

She finally stopped. One hand rested on her backpack, and she craned her neck up to look at him. “Is that a change of heart?”

Their eyes met. He looked defeated, more than anything. But he conceded.

“You… you’re right. It’s too important. I can’t stay here, not anymore.” His face sank. “If Andrew might be immune, I need to tell him.”

He didn’t share her fervor, but his sense of obligation was familiar. Enough for her to ease up on him, even if only slightly.

“Okay. Then tell me about this car of yours.” She sat back down, dropping her backpack beside her chair.

He smiled, just for a second, at that response. “Well, I’ve been living here for a few years. And every once in a while, I’ll hear things from people that I meet scavenging in town.” He peered out the kitchen window, taking a minute to collect his thoughts. “As I heard it, three years ago, the officials in the Denver quarantine zone decided they wanted to push out further west, and so they sent out a division of soldiers and FEDRA employees to develop a satellite base on the outskirts of Grand Junction. My understanding is that they were hoping to start making moves to reclaim the land on behalf of the military. But the whole thing fell apart after months of development because they couldn’t secure a perimeter, and the whole place ended up getting breached by spores. The whole facility is infected now. And the thing is, after the base was declared condemned, the people from Denver decided to cut their losses and abandon what they’d already built to avoid the risk of bringing the infection back to the zone. Which means the supplies they left behind should still be in there, including their vehicles, which would only be a few years old and should still be functional.”

“Even after hearing all this, you never checked this place out yourself?”

“I didn’t risk my life in an infected area to try and scavenge for military supplies? No, thank you.”

“Who’d you hear this from? Do you think other looters could have already picked the place clean?”

“I don’t think that’s likely. I know the few people that told me about it were headed up that way, but there aren’t that many that live around here. And the FEDRA signs alone are enough to deter most travelers. You wouldn’t find it unless you were looking for it.”

Ellie nodded slowly, mumbling under her breath to repeat the details to herself. “Gotta admit, this sounds like it may be a good plan.” She tilted her head slightly. “The place is filled with infected, though, right? Are you sure you can handle that?”

He steeled himself. “If you think _you_ can, then I trust you.”

“Then it’s a plan. Find the FEDRA base. Find a car. Get to Los Angeles.”

“Find the Fireflies.”

It was a strange thing to hear out loud. “We can head out tomorrow morning. If we don’t waste any time, we can get up to town in a couple days, and then work from there.” Ellie was still working it through in her head.

“Okay. Tomorrow morning, then.”

“At dawn.”

She shot him an affirmative glance, and he nodded, still tentative. Considering the plan, he slid further back in his chair, and the ray of sun shone over his shoulder blades.

As the two settled into their seats, Ellie reached back for her journal again.

* * *

At dawn, the chirping of the birds reverberated through the forest and echoed off the walls of Ben’s cabin. Ellie was already awake, tying up her sleeping bag in the front room. Her guns were all unloaded and laid out on the floor. She’d barely slept all night.

“Ben! Time to get moving!”

She flipped out her switchblade to briefly inspect it, then tucked it into her back pocket.

“Ben? Sun’s up; let’s take care of this so we don’t waste any daylight!”

She peered down the front hall. No response.

“…Ben?”

Her eyes narrowed. The walls were thin; he’d definitely heard her.

She walked down the front hall, hand reaching for her back pocket again, and shoved the door open.

Ben immediately jumped. He was seated at his desk. Ellie rolled her eyes.

“What are you doing?” she asked sharply. “I was calling for you.”

“Yes, I’m sorry…” He looked back at her over his shoulder, then turned toward the paper he’d been writing on. “I got distracted.” He tucked it into his desk drawer with a sigh.

“Writing letters?”

Scratching behind his ear, Ben stood from his seat, turning to face her and leaning back against his desk. “You should try it sometime. It might help you.”

“Uh huh… sure.” She pursed her lips thoughtfully for a split second, but promptly shook it off, jabbing back over her shoulder with her thumb. “C’mon. Let’s not waste any more time. I want to take inventory before we get on the road.”

“Fine, fine. I’m just… taking it in.” He let out a long, tired sigh. “I’ve been living here for a long time now. It’s kind of sad to leave the place behind.”

“Well. We do this, you can come back home with your conscience clear.” Ellie looked at the wall, brushing a strand of hair behind her ear.

Ben rested his hands on his hips and turned away from her again. His eyes scanned the whole, tiny bedroom. It was a comfortable little space. Cozy, even, in a certain way. But lonely, Ellie thought.

With a deep breath, he got down onto one knee and reached underneath his desk, to his safe. Sure enough, after a minute spent fiddling with the combination, he opened it to reveal an old lever-action hunting rifle, which lay in several separated parts on the inside of it, along with a scope and a box of ammunition. Ellie snickered at the sight of it – his only gun, and it would have taken five minutes to actually get to it and use it if he needed to.

As he got up from beside his desk, he reached underneath to pull out his own backpack – slightly smaller than hers – and tucked the contents of his safe inside it.

“Okay, so you have your gun,” said Ellie. “What else you got?”

The two turned back through the bedroom door, Ben following behind and reciting on his fingers as he thought about it.

“Well, besides my sleeping bag and my medicine…? As I said, I’ve got plenty of food. Pickled tomatoes, squash, okra… fruit leather, strawberry preserves, and some hardtack I made last fall. We should have enough to last us a long time, if we ration carefully.”

Ellie froze. “…Did you say preserves?”

“Sounds good, right?”

“Damn. You might be worth bringing along, after all.”

She tried to mask her excitement with a layer of sarcasm, but she hadn’t eaten decent food in months, and it was difficult to hide that.

As they returned to the front room, Ben handed off his bag to Ellie and immediately made his way for the cabinets to begin digging around for food. She returned to her backpack, which she’d already spent part of the morning sorting through, and set his down beside it. She took a seat cross-legged on the floor and immediately reached into his bag, setting to work putting the rifle back together.

“So, can we talk about weapons now?” she asked, pressing her tongue to the inside of her cheek.

Ben, in the middle of shaking the contents of a canning jar, glanced back over his shoulder. “I’m happy with what I have.”

“Your _one_ gun.”

“That’s right.”

She groaned under her breath. “…Listen, backpacking on foot isn’t exactly the same deal as living in the middle of the woods. You need to be able to defend yourself on short notice.” She slid the forend onto the rifle, giving it a light pat with one hand. “I mean… no offense, but… are you even a decent shot with this thing? Setting aside how heavy it is.”

His ego slightly bruised, Ben swiftly retorted, “My aim is just fine, thank you very much. But if you have an alternative proposition, I’d love to hear it.” He looked a little past her, at her own selection of weapons laid out on the floor. “If you want to trade, I’d be happy to take that revolver instead. I used to have one just like it.”

“The revolver’s mine.” She reached for it protectively, just on instinct. “I’ll tell you what; you take my pistol for now, and I’ll scavenge a new one for myself from the FEDRA base. They’ve got to have something usable.”

“Sounds fair to me.”

“In the meantime…” she hummed, peering down the sight she’d just attached to the rifle, “…how much can you carry?

“How much can _you_ carry? You don’t really want to lug around a shotgun _and_ a rifle, do you?”

Ellie suppressed a laugh. “Y’know, I think I can manage it.” She took another look at her own spread of weapons, then added, “That said, if it’s not too much for you, it’s better for you to have it.”

After another minute, she finished putting the gun in her hands together and reached over to affix it to Ben’s backpack. Then she started emptying out the contents of her own.

As he returned to the spot where she was sitting, arms full of jars of food, he slowed to a stop, eyes narrowing in confusion at the sight. Most of what she’d pulled out of her backpack seemed normal enough – a roll of gauze, some extra clothing, duct tape – but also what looked like a bag of something for lawn care, alongside baking soda, a tin of sugar and a few other strange ingredients.

“You, uh… do a lot of… baking? Traveling on the road…?” he trailed off, eyebrow raised.

It took her a moment to realize what he was talking about, and her eyes widened at his confusion. “Oh. Uh.” She nudged the sugar tin with her knee. “Take a few hundred grams of sugar, about a hundred more than that of the saltpeter, baking soda, some kerosene, if you can get it… in a metal container, it makes a pretty decent smoke bomb. Blows up on a short fuse. Good in a pinch.”

“So, when you say saltpeter…?”

“The stump remover. That’s the easiest way to find it. A lot of people pass that kind of thing up when they’re looting, so it’s all over the place.” She shrugged, diving back into her backpack. “I’ve got canisters for some real explosives in here, too, but the wiring is kinda fucked until I get around to fixing it.”

Her gear clattered around as she dug through it, turning over an old mine inside her backpack to read the label on it. Ben was just staring at her, wide-eyed.

“…You are one scary lady; you know that, right?”

“Hell, yeah.”

She smirked, but she didn’t look up. Ben set his own supplies down in her pile, and she set off sorting it all out between the pair’s backpacks.

It wasn’t until a few minutes later that she realized that Ben had wandered off to the other side of the room, hovering restlessly around the kitchen table.

“Hey. You good, Ben?” Ellie asked, zipping her backpack shut.

He seemed surprised to hear his name, but promptly turned to look at her. “Yes. Fine; just thinking…”

He was still making that face from the day prior, lost in thought.

Ellie frowned at the sight. “I know. It’s a lot. I get it.” She pressed her hands into her knees and stood, raising herself up to eye level, and swung her backpack around her shoulders. “Listen. We want the same thing. From this point forward… we’re in it together. And I’ve got your back. I swear.” She leaned in for emphasis, neck craned slightly upward, and reached down to grab his bag, handing it off to him. “This is the right thing. Okay?”

She said that as much for her own benefit as for his.

They looked each other in the eye. Ben gave a faint, wavering nod, holding his bag in both hands.

Then she turned to the door, swinging it open and letting in the outside air.

She took a deep breath. “Okay. Let’s go find the Fireflies.”


	3. Letter to Anna

_~~Anna~~ _

_~~Mom~~ _

_Anna,_

_Fuck. I’ve been journaling since forever. This still feels dumb. It’s totally different. You’ve been dead since the fucking beginning of time. I don’t even really know what you look like. I don’t know the sound of your voice. I don’t know if I should call you ‘Mom’ because I don’t even know what it makes sense to call you._

_Who are you?_

_I have the bullshit Marlene told me. But that’s, well, probably all bullshit. I know what people say about their friends after they die. All the good shit and none of the bad shit, most of the time, unless they’re trying to seem honest or lighten the mood. But nobody wants to be sincere about the bad shit after you’re dead. Especially not when they’re talking to your daughter, who never met you._

_I know you said you’re stubborn. I’m stubborn, too. So I guess we have that in common, at least._

_I have the letter you gave me. I mean, I don’t actually have it anymore. But I copied down what I remember from it. Which is almost all of it. I used to lie awake in bed and read it over and over again._

_You said, ‘make me proud’. The fuck does that mean? If it was up to Marlene, who knows where I’d be right now? Would I have grown up to be a Firefly? Would I be a fucking Wolf right now? ~~Should I write Marlene a letter?~~_

_There was a minute there where I thought I was gonna be a mom. I made a joke about you to Dina. She forced a laugh at it but I could tell it made her uncomfortable. It made me uncomfortable, too. I said, ‘I made it past day one so I’m already doing better than my mom did’. Something like that but wittier. I was just trying to make her laugh. She has a nice laugh. I bet you’d really like her._

_Still, I’m sorry I said that. You didn’t deserve it, I don’t think. You did the best you could. Probably._

_I hope little Potato is doing okay. I know he is, though. Someone better at it than me is taking care of him._

_Sorry, ignore that. That doesn’t have anything to do with you._

_And even though I’m the only one reading this, I still felt the need to say that. So maybe this whole letter thing really is starting to get to me. I think I’m gonna do Riley next._

_Sorry, again._

_I know you wanted to change the world. I know you said, ‘life is worth living’._

_I also know that if it was up to you, I would have died in that Firefly hospital. So that’s another thing we have in common. Probably._

_I’m still trying to make you proud. I’ve been trying for so damn long. I don’t even know what it means to want this, but I want you to be proud of me._

_The world is even more messed up than I think you knew. It is probably more messed up than it used to be. And there are some truly messed up people. Sometimes I think I might be one of them. But I’m trying not to be._

_I’ve also met some good people. Some of them are really good, but most of them are complicated. And they’re trying to do better. In a way, I almost feel like that’s more admirable. Trying to grow, and all that._

_On my best days, I think: if I can feel that way about other people, maybe I can feel that way about myself._

_On my best days, I think about you. And what you wanted for me._

_I’m telling the truth when I say I really don’t know who you are. But I still think about you._

_And you know what? This helped. So, thanks for listening. It was nice to think about you again._

_Something big happened to me this week. Really big, I think._

_Maybe I’m not alone after all. Maybe there is a point to all this._

_You said, ‘find your purpose and fight for it’._

_Gonna make you proud. I promise._

_Forever, your loving daughter_

_Ellie_


	4. Something Extraordinary

“Look at that view!”

Ben put his hand to his forehead as he climbed the hill by the roadside, meeting Ellie there at the edge of the cliff. Far below stretched acres of grass-spotted flatlands, which rolled into distant mesas.

The springtime breeze was just beginning to give way to summertime heat, and the two were definitely feeling it now that they were outside of the shaded woodlands that surrounded Ben’s cabin. Shortly after setting out, Ben had donned a silly, wide-brimmed bucket hat to block the sun, but Ellie was content simply to allow her t-shirt to acquire a few new pit stains – after all, she hadn’t bathed in a long time, anyway.

They stood together at the cliff’s edge for a few minutes, taking the opportunity to catch their breath before pushing on.

“You know,” said Ellie, one hand resting on her hip, “If this lead of yours really does get us a car, we’ll probably be in Los Angeles within the week.”

“It’s strange to think about. This has all happened very fast… I feel like so much has changed for me in such a short time.” Ben scratched behind his ear, considering. “I have to ask… when we get there… what do you think the Fireflies will actually want from us, specifically?”

“Honestly? I don’t know.” That was a half-truth, but she said it with some confidence. “It’s hard to say. We don’t even know how many of them there are. But we need to see it through.” She closed her eyes and felt the sunshine on her face.

“I just hope they’re happy to see us.”

“Yeah. Me, too.”

It was a very fleeting sense of calm, but Ellie took the opportunity to enjoy it. Ben seemed to be in no hurry to interrupt it.

Eventually, though, the moment passed, and Ellie was the one to turn away first. “Come on. Let’s not waste any more time.”

“Yep.”

He descended the hill a few steps behind her, and the pair returned to the spot where they’d broken from the open road. Ellie dug around in her backpack for the map she’d been marking up, and Ben tucked his hands into his pockets, following several paces behind.

“What’s our exit again?”

“121.” She had her nose buried in the map. “And judging by the last sign, it’ll be in, like, a half-mile. Are you sure this place is going to be before the exit?”

This was how they’d been traveling for hours, up and down the street, scouring every inch with a fragment of a road atlas they’d scavenged from a blown-out library.

“If my information was good, then…” Ben trailed off.

Ellie walked ahead another few steps before she realized that he had stopped following behind.

She peered up from the map with a frown to look back at him over her shoulder. “Then…?”

“Look for yourself.”

He pointed down the road in front of her with both eyebrows raised – dead ahead was the wreckage of what must have been a devastating car accident. Somehow, a van had managed to completely flip, smashing its windshield in the process and leaving dark skid marks across twenty feet of asphalt. Interesting, considering how sparsely populated with cars the country road had been up until then. But more interesting was the white text painted along the van’s side: _FE.D.R.A._

“Whoa… now, _that’s_ something.” Ellie hurried ahead to investigate.

The skid marks carried through from a busted section of the fence on the other side of the road.

“What do you think happened here?” asked Ben, crossing his arms as Ellie investigated the tracks.

“Looks like the van must have driven through the fence.” She stood, tracing a line with her hand in the potential path of the crash. “Maybe it rolled down the hill?”

“It looks like they blocked off what used to be the road over here. I suppose this led up to the base at one point.” Ben made his way to the ruined fence – one segment had a sign attached to it, this one reading, ‘Condemned by order of the Federal Disaster Response Agency: NO TRESPASSING’.

“Figures,” Ellie replied with a scoff, marching over to look for herself. “If they can’t have their stuff, nobody can. Assholes…”

“Well, we don’t know that. They’re probably just trying to keep people safe. The place is supposed to be infected, after all.”

She looked up at him curiously, placing her hands on her hips. “I don’t really see why the military deserves the benefit of the doubt, but sure. Whatever you want. Let’s just take their shit and get out of here.”

“That much is fine by me.”

Fortunately, the opening in the fence was plenty big enough for the two of them to proceed through, though getting their bearings on the unpaved dirt road beyond it took a moment.

The trail was surprisingly narrow as they followed it up the cliff, at least until it merged with a paved road after a few minutes of walking. The overturned car, apparently, had skidded off the road and rolled all the way down to the fence. That alone was strong evidence that something catastrophic had happened here.

The pair reached the top of the hill, and immediately the base came into view: a sprawling, angular, grey facility that spanned the cliff side, overlooking the valley below. It was clearly some kind of repurposed building, and the parking lot outside had a number of ruined cars from before the outbreak. But there was plenty of FEDRA paraphernalia, too, and the road leading in had a security booth that had clearly been hastily erected after the fact.

They approached the parking lot first. The far wall of the building leading out there was lined with shutter garage doors, though not one of them was open. Ben moved forward to investigate, but before he could, Ellie shot out a hand to stop him, gesturing fiercely.

“Hear that?” she whispered.

Just beyond their line of sight, a familiar screeching echoed out into the parking lot. A second later, the source of the noise appeared; a single clicker wandering around in-between the broken-down cars.

Ellie was already reaching for her bow. “Looks like we’ve got a roamer.”

Her expression grew intense for a moment as she nocked an arrow, giving the clicker another few seconds to wander closer. Then she let out a whistle, just loud enough to get its attention.

As she predicted, it perked up at the sound and craned its neck upward, only for its face to be instantly speared by an arrow, dropping it before it could identify the two of them. It twitched a few times before going limp, and Ellie gestured to Ben as she approached the body, slinging her bow back over her shoulder again.

“Hey, you’re a pretty good shot with that thing,” he commented with mild surprise, watching, impressed, as she approached to retrieve her arrow from the skull of the dead infected.

“Why, thank you. I try.” She pressed her foot into the clicker’s throat as she yanked the arrow out, tucking it back into the quiver on her backpack. “Okay, dude. What have you got for us…?” She dusted off her hands before kneeling down beside it, digging into its rotting clothes. After a few seconds of rooting around in its pockets, she retrieved an ID card, pursing her lips as she read it aloud. “‘Julian… Ramirez’. Guy must have been doing a patrol or something.”

Ben stood over her with a frown. “Too bad he wasn’t immune.”

“Yup…” She grimaced, standing up straight again and tossing the card back onto the corpse. “Well, we’re definitely in the right place. ID says they’re from the Denver QZ.”

“That’s definitely promising.”

“Let’s see if we can’t find a way into one of the garages.” As she spoke, Ellie reached for her bag again, this time to retrieve her journal. She scribbled down ‘Julian’ at the bottom of her list of names.

The garage doors appeared sealed from the outside, but nevertheless, Ellie knelt to try prying one open. Predictably, it wouldn’t budge. Ben watched her struggle with it for a moment before stepping in.

“Do… do you need some help?”

“It’s not gonna open from this side. Ugh.” She pulled herself to her feet, wiping her hands on her pants. “We need to get in there another way. We’ll have to find a way to open one of the garage doors from inside the place…”

She set off past him to scour the side of the building, not bothering to wait for his input. He shuffled along behind her anyway.

The building’s original front entrance was caved in with rubble, but signs along the far wall led them to what used to be a side entrance at the top of a wheelchair ramp, now dressed up with government signage to look more official. A metal detector was set up in front of it. Ellie stepped through to test it – no response.

The clicking and croaking of infected was clearly audible from that spot. She held up a hand to stop Ben from advancing, pressing her ear to the door and focusing intently on the noise coming from inside.

“I’m clocking four of them in here,” she declared after a minute of assessing, turning back toward Ben to make sure she had his attention. “I’ll draw them out, and you drop them one by one. Fish in a barrel. Sound good?”

She looked him right in the eye, and he nodded, reaching for his backpack to retrieve his gun. He clearly wasn’t prepared for a situation like this; he didn’t even have a proper holster for a pistol. Ellie caught herself missing her days on patrol duty.

“On my count,” she continued, shaking the thoughts out of her head. “Three… two…”

The two exchanged nods, and Ellie crouched to the side of the door, slamming her fist against it to make as much noise as possible. Of course, the sound immediately drew the clickers, and at the first sign of footsteps, Ellie yanked the door wide open, releasing an enormous cloud of spores out into the open air.

Ben steadied his pistol with both hands and aimed the sights directly at the open door. The first of the infected from inside shuffled out with a furious screech, head craning in every direction as it struggled to locate whatever had created the noise, and several bullets ripped through its face. Ben tapped on the trigger as the infected charged outside, dropping the first three before any could approach. The fourth, Ellie took care of herself, plunging her switchblade into its throat and lowering it roughly to the ground.

The whole group was cleared out in just a few seconds. Ellie knelt over the body of the clicker she’d grappled, taking a few sharp breaths and wiping off her knife on her t-shirt. “Alright, not bad.”

She searched the bodies with a deep breath. One of them had a pistol to replace the one she’d given Ben, which she tucked away. And most of them had names. ‘Rhonda’, ‘Jared’, and ‘Avery’. Only one of them didn’t have an ID. The others all got added to Ellie’s list.

Ben looked over her shoulder as she wrote, but as usual, didn’t comment on it.

“Well, what do you know?” he said as he looked over the bodies. “There _were_ four of them. Where did you learn to do that?”

There was a little pride in Ellie’s voice as she replied, “I had a good teacher.” Then she shut her journal and tucked it away again.

Spores were drifting out of the open doorway in a thick haze now. Ben, on instinct, had drifted a few steps away from it, but Ellie didn’t take notice of it until he reached for his backpack to feel around for a gas mask, which he began to adjust the strap of.

She raised an eyebrow at him. “What are you doing?”

Ben stopped for a second, looking up from the mask in his hands with equal confusion. “What are _you_ doing? Don’t you have one?”

“Uh, did you forget already?” She shrugged with open hands, gesturing back at the spores wafting out from the inside of the building. “Ben, we’re _immune_. That means we can’t get infected.”

“So… you don’t wear a mask in spores? Really?”

“Why would I? They don’t do anything to me. And they won’t do anything to you, either.”

He froze at the thought. Presumably, he’d been wearing a mask in spores since before Ellie was even born, so his reluctance was probably understandable, if not rational.

“I… think I’ll just wear mine, thank you.”

“Why…?” she asked, tilting her head inquisitively. “Well, whatever. Suit yourself, I guess… I just hate trying to breathe through those things.” One hand reached for the strap of her backpack, and she turned again, switching on her flashlight in the cloudy doorway. “Listen, we’ll probably run into more infected inside, so keep your eyes and ears open. You need to be ready to use that rifle if we get into a jam. Can I rely on you do that?”

The exasperation on his face was clear despite the fact that it was now obscured by his gas mask. “I can do it. I’m not a helpless old man, Ellie. I’ve dealt with infected before.”

“Okay. Let’s move, then. I’m counting on you to watch my back.”

“I got it, I got it. Watch your back… I don’t need you to tell me…”

He grumbled it mostly to himself. She just rolled her eyes.

The air inside the narrow entry hall was dense with spores, nearly enough to make it opaque. Their twin flashlight beams didn’t do much to help. But the coast was apparently clear.

As soon as Ellie made sure of that, she sucked in her breath in a loud, exaggerated fashion, waving the spores into her mouth with her hands. “Ah, fresh air!” she teased, before immediately making a face and letting out a small cough. “Agh. Actually smells like ass in here. Still, it’s safe, see?”

“Unbelievable…”

Almost immediately, Ben slowed to a near stop, awestruck just from the sight of her. Whatever small part of him that had still been skeptical was stamped out in an instant. And Ellie noticed it, too, even if she didn’t give him time to let it sink in.

The other end of the hall had only a single other door, which was blocked from the inside by a chair propped up against the handle. The four infected from earlier had apparently barricaded themselves inside, only to get infected from the spores, or else from each other. Rhonda, Jared, Avery, and another…

Ellie moved the chair with a cautious glance back at Ben, then crouched at the door again, opening it slowly and quietly into the next room. The spores thinned out as they escaped the confined hallway, which opened up into a second, much wider corridor that extended further down in two opposite directions. The room had been set up as some kind of checkpoint, with a little orange barrier funneling people from the door to a check-in table. Of course, the whole thing was in disrepair, now; one of the barriers was completely overturned, and the floor was littered up and down with paper.

Two more clickers were aimlessly roaming around inside, as well, and Ellie held Ben back in the doorway as she scoped them out. He stumbled at the interruption to their movement.

She moved to dispatch them on her own, swiftly and silently, drawing her switchblade from her back pocket. Ben rested against the door frame as he watched her work, stabbing one of the infected through the temple before stalking up behind the other. She was ruthlessly efficient at it.

“…You know, you seem pretty experienced at this for someone so young,” he noted, shoving off of the door frame to meet her in the center of the room.

Ellie tucked her knife away again, peering down at the clicker at her feet. Then she set off down in the opposite direction from him, gesturing for him to resume following. “Well, no offense, but you seem pretty _in_ experienced at this for someone so old. Most people don’t make it to your age, you know? Especially living by themselves.”

He shrugged, unashamed. “I spent most of the time since the outbreak living in Denver. I’ve only lived on the outside for a few years.”

“So why did you leave?”

“I…” He dragged on the word, reluctant. “I… had a… disagreement. With Andrew, back when we lived together in the zone. We decided it would be easier if we didn’t live so close to each other. That’s all.”

She hesitated for a second, glancing back over her shoulder at him, and shrugged. “Look, man; you don’t need to tell me anything about yourself if you don’t want to. I honestly don’t care one way or the other. I’m just making small talk.”

“Thank you. …I think.”

They walked in silence for a minute.

The further in they got, the more relics from the building’s original purpose started to crop up. An old, rusted forklift was now merged with the wall by a layer of blooming fungus, which had grown out of a nearby corpse. Just beyond it, a collapsed metal shelf created a small roadblock in the center of the hall.

Ellie vaulted over the side of it, then stopped, resting a hand on the edge as she waited for Ben to follow suit. “You asked earlier what the Fireflies will want from us.” She looked at Ben seriously for a moment. “When we get there… will Andrew be open to what we have to say?”

“It’s for the greater good. I can talk to him about it. He’ll see reason. I mean, we’re _immune_ … he’ll see the significance of that.” Ben gave a grunt as he threw a leg over the side of the shelf, stumbling to the floor on the other side. The effort made him stop to catch his breath.

“And… what if you’re wrong, and Andrew’s not there?”

His eyes lowered at the thought. “I suppose we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. But I’m confident he would have gone to meet up with the Fireflies.” He leaned back against the shelf, then shrugged. “You certainly seem to think my son is an important part of this.”

“I think he might be immune. So, yeah. I’d say that makes him pretty damn important.”

They exchanged a glance.

“I’m the first immune person you’ve ever heard of besides yourself, right?”

“What are you getting at…?”

“Nothing. Just.” Ben studied her face. “It’s… extraordinary, all things considered. Don’t you think? Just, all of this…”

Ellie didn’t have a proper response. Something about that needled her, and she stared past him, down the hall, through the spores fluttering down into the concrete.

“Come on.” She tugged on the strap of her backpack as she started off walking again. “We should be getting pretty close, now.”

Slightly put off, Ben furrowed his brow before replying, “By all means, lead on.”

They set off in their formation again. And though the place was winding and labyrinthine, full of small doors that led nowhere, Ellie’s prediction turned out to be correct. Within a few minutes, the corridor broke off into an enormous fork, branching off in three separate directions. This time, there was actually a sign to direct them, though it was hanging ajar from the wall.

_Firing Range & Holding Area <_

_Personnel Support >_

_Garage & Vehicle Staging Area ^_

Naturally, lest the trip become too easy, the path to the garage was completely blocked off. Two more of the metal shelves from earlier had been overturned on the floor along the path, one of which had somehow been crumpled in half, blocking the way with a few jagged lengths of steel.

“Well, shit,” said Ellie as she examined the wreck. “Garage is through here, but…”

“Now what? Should we try and squeeze through?” Ben eyed up the few small gaps between the shelves apprehensively.

She took a few steps further in to shine her flashlight the rest of the way down. “Nah. The hall opens up down there, see? We can box around the other side and get in that way.”

“…Box around?”

“Go around. Whatever. You take three right turns – you know what; never mind.”

“Alright, then.”

Ellie brushed past, slightly embarrassed, and hung right around the fork, this time setting off for what the sign described as the path to the firing range.

Finally, the hallway opened up into a wider room. A _much_ wider room, the two would soon realize, as the ceiling above their heads when they entered reached thirty or forty feet up, dispersing the spores inside even more thinly. The massive open floor of this central room accounted for the scale of the building from the outside, and it stretched far enough that it was difficult to see the opposite end through the spores, in spite of the sun shining in through windows at the top edges of the walls. Most of the space was taken up with temporary barriers and tents set up by FEDRA, but there was old, rusted machinery scattered around as well, some now completely overgrown with fungus. As Ben had speculated, the place looked like it had been evacuated in a serious hurry. It was mostly quiet inside, but the distant croaks of infected echoed off the walls in a consistent rhythm, just enough to make the whole place feel a little bit alive.

The firing range was nearest to the hall when the pair of them emerged, and Ellie wandered up to it as they looked around, wide-eyed.

“Damn, this place is huge…” she murmured, keeping her voice low. “What do you think it was used for before the outbreak?” Tongue pressed to the inside of her cheek, she drew her pistol from her bag, aiming down the sights absentmindedly at one of the shooting range targets.

“I think this used to be one of those shipping storage places. Where they boxed up packages before sending them out.” Ben adjusted his gas mask with both hands as he sidled up next to her.

“Oh, for real? Cool.” She clicked her tongue and tucked her pistol away again. “Place must’ve been neat back when it was up and running. Full of robots and everything.”

“True. All that cardboard sure killed a lot of trees, though.”

Ellie took a second to parse that before shooting him a look. “You guys worried about some _weird_ shit, man.”

“Don’t I know it? But it was a different time.”

She snickered, turning her back to the shooting range to head closer to the door where they came in. They both took a minute to get their bearings there. For such a large base, there was something especially bizarre about seeing it in such disrepair.

“Just _look_ at this place!” Ellie swept her arm out toward the open room. “There could be some really nice supplies in here. Are you sure you’re happy with the two guns you’ve got? It might be worth scavenging deeper in.”

Ben shook his head. “I don’t think so. We don’t want to risk getting lost in a place like this. It’s too dangerous.”

“It’ll be fine as long as we take it slow. Trust me, I know when I’m in over my head. Something like this? This isn’t it.”

“Correct me if I’m wrong, but haven’t you been bitten twice already?”

Ellie hesitated, opening her mouth and immediately closing it again. “…Okay, touché.”

“The sooner we get out of here, the better.” Ben chuckled lightly to himself. “Let’s just find the garage and go.”

“Alright, alright. Fair enough.” She took a breath with closed eyes. “Home stretch, then.”

“I’d say it’s about time, wouldn’t you?”

The wide-open room seemed to be some kind of a central hub for the base, which they discovered as they followed the back wall and found several more hallways feeding into it. Ellie led them through the one nearest where they came in earlier, and they swiftly ‘boxed around’ the roadblock by the garage, circling behind it through the hall on the opposite side.

Around the bend from the wrecked shelves, the corridor led down a short flight of steps into a pair of double doors, above which the sign indicated the entrance to the garage proper. This doorway, too, was blocked, however, this time by a heavy locker that had been pushed in front of it. They paused in front of it at the sight, and Ben frowned, resting his hands on his hips.

“Blocked from the outside? That can’t be a good sign,” he murmured.

“Just be careful. We’ll be fine.” Ellie cracked her knuckles, moving to wrap her hands around the side of the locker. “Here, help me move this.”

“I don’t like this…”

Reluctantly, Ben grabbed the locker from the other side, and together they struggled to drag it out of the way of the door. More accurately, _Ben_ struggled with it, while Ellie strained to pick up his slack, feet skidding against the concrete as she steadied herself.

“Fuck!”

Overcompensating, Ellie put too much force on the back end, and the whole locker tipped over in the direction of the stairs, falling out of both their hands and slamming into the concrete with a resounding crash. The noise echoed all the way down the hall. Ellie rested her hands on her knees with a sigh. and Ben wandered a few steps back, listening in the distance for any troubling noises – nothing yet, but it didn’t help the concerns he already had.

“Something probably heard that,” he said nervously.

“Yeah, you’re probably right. Get your weapon out.” After a second to collect herself, Ellie stood up straight taking the opportunity to listen for infected through the door.

“Anything?”

“Maybe. Hard to tell.” She reached around to her backpack to draw her shotgun, leaning her back against the door with her hand hovering around the lever. “Whatever’s trapped in there isn’t gonna be happy to see us. Be ready for it.”

“I am, I am…” He reached back to retrieve his pistol as she instructed, grumbling under his breath.

They nodded to each other, and slowly, Ellie pulled the door open, leading the two of them as they stalked inside with their weapons raised.

The enclosed garage was almost entirely pitch-black, save for the glow of their flashlights. Creeping further in, the light cast over rows and rows of military vehicles, mostly untouched – though several were overgrown and emitting spores. For as reassuring of a sight as it was, though, it provided ample cover when the room inevitably erupted with the screeching of infected.

Each raised their weapons as two clickers stumbled out from behind a truck, arms flailing. Ellie aimed her shotgun at the first one that approached and instantly blew it in half. Ben, on the other hand, struggled with his. His first shot missed, ricocheting off the hood of the truck. His second shot hit it squarely in the chest, but the clicker hardly slowed down, the bullet lodged in the layer of mushrooms growing out of its chest. It tackled him, and he stumbled backwards with a yelp, thrusting his hands against its chest to keep away from its snapping jaws.

Ellie’s eyes instantly darted to the side. “Ben!”

She scrambled to help, slamming the butt of her shotgun into the side of its head once to knock it away, and then again for good measure, sending it hurtling onto its back. As she did, another clicker darted out from the darkness. Her next two shots, she fired in quick succession in-between the pumps of her shotgun: one to the clicker running at her, and then another to remove the face of the one on the ground, keeping her foot planted on its chest to pin it to the floor.

Ben rested the back of his head against the wall and dropped his pistol to the floor. His chest heaving, he struggled to get his breathing under control, shaky hands reaching for his mask to secure it against his face.

“Goddammit…!” Ellie brushed her bangs out of her eyes roughly with the back of her hand, then steadied her grip on her weapon. “Any more of you fuckers?” she shouted out into the garage.

There was no response. The room was silent now. She pumped her shotgun, and the spent shell clattered to the floor with a quiet _tink_. Then she hunched over to take a breath, exhaling loudly.

“Are you okay?” She peered back at him over her shoulder, slightly concerned at the sight of him.

Ben closed his eyes for a moment. “Yes, I… I’m alright…” His reassurance was somewhat undermined by the fact that he was breathless with fear.

“I guess I don’t need to ask whether you got bitten.”

“It’s okay. I didn’t.”

“Are you sure? You didn’t notice last time.”

“Ellie, I’m _fine_.”

She almost protested, but decided against it with a shrug, swinging her shotgun back around to affix it to her backpack again.

“Well, it looks like your info was good. We’ve got a car, alright. Two dozen of them. Can’t believe the military would leave all this behind just because of a few spores.”

Ben finally stood from the wall, sighing out of frustration with himself. “We… we should inspect them as thoroughly as we can, but I’m confident we’ll be able to get something running.” He knelt awkwardly to retrieve his pistol from the ground, looking up at her. “They… uh, they should keep the keys somewhere in here. Why don’t you go see if you can find anything, and I’ll start taking a look under some of the hoods to make sure everything’s intact?”

“Before that, how about I get one of these garage doors open? That way we can actually see what we’re doing in here.”

“Yes, good idea…”

She waited one more second to make sure he had himself together, then marched off toward the other end of the garage, shining her light around the shuttered door to get a better view.

After a few minutes, while Ben was absorbed in his inspection of one of the vans, Ellie called out: “I don’t see a chain to get this thing open. I think it needs power. Shouldn’t there be a release cord or something?”

“There isn’t one?”

“I don’t see one. But it’s hard to tell in the dark like this.”

“Well, if it needs power, there’s probably a generator around here. Maybe you can get that up and running, too. Get the lights on in here.”

“Yeah, there’s always a fucking generator… alright, hang tight. I’ll start poking around.” She approached him again, patting a hand on the top of the van Ben was in the middle of inspecting. “How about cars? See anything that seems promising?” She looked up and immediately froze – the next vehicle over was a four-ton Humvee, resting right in front of the shutter doors like it was on display. “Aw, shit! We’ve _got_ to get one of those! I’ve always wanted to drive one of those big ones.”

Ben was briefly taken aback. “You know how to drive?”

“ _Yes_ , I know how to drive!”

“Well, how am I supposed to know? They don’t exactly offer driver’s ed these days.” He glanced upward, frowning as though disappointed to reign in her enthusiasm. “Anyway, the Humvee isn’t such a good idea. Those run on diesel. We need something that runs on regular unleaded, so we can easily siphon more fuel for it on the road. Otherwise, we might end up stranded.”

“Oh, yeah… damn…” Ellie took another forlorn glance at the car she would never get to drive. “Well, pick something cool at least.”

He chuckled under his breath. “Okay, I’ll do my best.”

She moved from the car again to explore the rest of the garage, this time with a hand close to her leg holster at all times.

The wall opposite the garage door contained most of the room’s supplies and car parts, including a set of old, empty gas canisters with a siphon wrapped around the top, which Ellie was quick to loot. The further down she went, the denser the patch of fungus on the walls grew, and she followed the trail all the way to a security booth in the corner of the room, where the overgrowth was so dense that she had to pry the door open with a foot against the wall.

Inside, the fungus was several inches thick, spread from wall to wall, enough to completely conceal the concrete. Ellie panned her flashlight beam across the booth, teeth gritted.

She stepped over a pair of contorted legs on the floor, the apparent source of the overgrowth. The corpse’s torso and head were completely buried. A few steps further down, she found the garage’s generator – which would have been a good sign, except for the fact that it, too, was lush with fungus, leaving the machinery overgrown. Ellie leaned down to tug on the cord, but it didn’t budge, going taut without jump-starting the engine – being depleted of gas was the least of the problems with it.

“Fucking thing…” She kicked it once for good measure, but somehow that did not miraculously cause it to spring to life. Then she poked her head out the door again: “Hey, Ben! I found the generator, but it’s ruined! See if you can find another way to get that door open!”

His voiced echoed back, “I’m on it!”

Then she peeked back inside the booth, mumbling to herself as she looked it over. “Alright. What else…?”

The booth seemed to be otherwise barren, almost suspiciously so. The few drawers behind the counter were empty. Ellie nearly left, but the glint of something poking out near the top of the wall caught her eye, and she reached for it, prying it off the wall. It was a metal sign, one reading, ‘Vehicle Check-Out’, as she discovered after brushing it off with her arm. Beneath it was the edge of a key rack, which was almost completely invisible behind the fungus enveloping it.

“There you are.” Ellie drew her switchblade from her pocket and got to work carving it out. Each thrust of the blade sent little puffs of spores into the air, but slowly the rest of the key rack came into view, each key labeled to correspond to parking spaces in the garage. She dug her hand into the mound to pull out a handful of keys, jingling them as she shook the specks of cordyceps residue off them.

And then something beneath her groaned, and she looked over to see the legs on the floor twitching.

Her back was immediately against the wall. “Oh… oh, fuck…”

The mound on the wall shifted, and the legs spasmed as their upper body apparently came to life, heaving with a loud, pained growl. Ellie sidled out of the booth as fast as she could, and as she left, the mushrooms growing into the wall shattered and broke apart as a humanoid form emerged from it, completely covered from head to toe, stumbling forward as though it was too heavy to properly control its own movements.

“Ellie?” Ben called out to her as she emerged, walking back to the center of the garage to get her attention. “I’ve been looking at these vans; I think we –”

“ _Shh!_ ” She shot a finger furiously to her lips.

The bloater cried out into the darkness behind her, its heavy footsteps pounding on the concrete floor as it stumbled out of the security booth. Under his mask, Ben’s eyes went wide with terror. He and Ellie exchanged a panicked glance, and she shook her head furiously, backing up with her hands raised to indicate not to shoot.

Only a few feet from her, the bloater furiously barked in every direction, head darting around even more erratically than a clicker’s as it searched for the source of the noise. Finding nothing right away, the barks slowed to a few long, booming croaks, and it leaned its whole body forward, searching desperately for any sound to latch onto.

Ellie covered her mouth to quiet her breathing. Ben backed up against the truck he’d been examining, reaching his hand cautiously behind him to grasp for his pistol. The bloater slowed to a stop, stumbling a few steps further forward and then standing in place, its chest heaving. And Ben backed up a little too far, accidentally knocking his elbow into the open hood of the truck and slamming it shut with a crash that echoed off the walls.

The bloater perked up instantly, and before Ben could even be sure it knew he was there, it dug a hand into itself to tear off a chunk of fungus, hurling it across the room. The bomb exploded into spores along the edge of the truck, and Ben nearly fell over trying to stumble out of the way of it.

Sheepish and fearful, he straightened out in the center of the garage and stared the bloater down, praying that it would somehow forget he was there. Instead, it let out a thunderous roar, curling its arms behind it, and then took off at full speed, stampeding down the length of the garage.

His eyes wide open, Ben ran as fast as he could to the opposite wall and swerved to the side, but even with a head start, he was only just barely fast enough to get out of the way before it slammed full-force against the garage door, leaving an enormous dent. It pounded on the steel with club-like arms, flailing them around imprecisely, and Ben took one step back before getting shoved to the side and knocked to the ground several feet away. Then it took a step away from the door, re-orienting itself toward its prey.

Ben was clearly not escaping on his own, and so Ellie did the thing she had been desperately trying to avoid, drawing her pistol and firing off a few fruitless shots into its back. “Hey, over here, you piece of shit!” she shouted, circling around to draw the bloater in the opposite direction before it could close in on Ben’s body.

And the strategy worked, for better or worse, as the shots peppering it from behind managed to get its attention and turn it toward her. Ellie, too, was less than excited about it as it began lurching in her direction.

She moved as fast as she could. The pistol, she tossed haphazardly to the ground, and both hands scrambled behind her to grab her shotgun again, tapping on the trigger the instant she had the bloater in her sights – its approach hardly slowed. She pumped it and fired again when it was six feet from her. Chunks of blood and flesh blasted from its side, but all it did was howl in her direction, stomping its feet until it hit point-blank range.

Ellie pumped the shotgun again and pressed the choke to the underside of its chin, then fired. It recoiled for a second as a layer of the fungus plating its face was shredded off. Then it grabbed for Ellie’s head.

Teeth gnashing, she raised the shotgun horizontally to interpose it between herself and the bloater, and its hand gripped the center of it, shoving her to the ground with incredible force. She gripped the sides of the gun with both hands, struggling with all her might against the force of the creature’s one arm, and the contest of strength ended with the gun crumpling like paper in its hand, sending scraps of metal and plastic clattering to the floor around Ellie’s face.

“Fuck! Fuck!” With the shotgun now destroyed, Ellie pressed her feet to the floor and shuffled a few feet back, now scrambling to grab her revolver before the bloater descended on her. And indeed, she managed to line it up from her awkward position on the ground, firing another three or four shots into its mangled face before it effortlessly slapped the weapon out of her hand, curling its thick fingers around her throat.

Ellie’s back slowly left the ground as the bloater lifted her from the floor up into the air, clutching her by the throat. Her whole face was beet red now. Her legs dangling helplessly beneath her, she whined with pain, the enormous hand around her throat threatening to crush her windpipe at any second. She struggled to kick it, but she couldn’t even gather the strength to swing her leg out, let alone the momentum for it to make a significant impact. With its other hand, it clasped at her collar and then moved to her forearm, sending a blinding shock of pain through her body as her whole right arm threatened to disconnect from her shoulder. Then another gunshot rang out, and the grip against her arm suddenly slacked as the bloater recoiled forward, howling in her face.

At the other end of the garage, Ben pulled back the lever on his rifle, panting furiously through his mask, which was now hopelessly ajar on his face. He lined up another shot and fired at the back of the bloater’s head, and this time it recoiled enough to release Ellie, dropping her like a stone back onto the floor of the garage. She gasped desperately for air, clawing at the ground, as it turned away from her, shuffling back in the opposite direction again.

“Goddamn piece of motherfucking shit–!” Ellie yanked her switchblade out of her back pocket again and drove it straight into the leg of the bloater, but the blade didn’t even go in far enough for it to notice. It shuffled away from her, leaving her to charge in Ben’s direction again.

Moving at double-time, she flung her backpack from her shoulders and stuck her aching right arm inside, fishing around for supplies as fast as she could manage. She grabbed the first thing her fingers found, a bottle of alcohol, which she immediately bit the lid off of, spitting it out onto the concrete while her other hand found a rag to stuff inside.

The bloater had nearly reached Ben again when the glass shattered against its back, soaking the whole, hulking infected in a layer of burning alcohol and causing the whole thing to go up in flames. And even _then_ , it still did not drop right away, though it did stop running in favor of stomping its feet in place and flailing its arms around. It was shrieking in pain and confusion now, not able to properly sense anything as the flames covered its face. Ben raised his rifle and fired another few shots at its chest, and finally, _finally_ the thing fell to its knees, letting out a few more groggy moans.

It perked up at the sound of Ellie’s footsteps as she sprinted towards it, slamming her foot into its face with as much force as she could muster. “Mother _fucker!_ ”

It reeled back with a groan, and then it finally collapsed dead, its body smoldering on the ground.

Ellie took two steps back and then stumbled to the ground, landing inelegantly on her backside. “Holy fucking shit…” She sucked in her breath, trembling, and then let out a breathless chuckle, lighting up Ben with her flashlight. “Okay… okay. I’ll admit it. You’re… you’re not a bad shot with that thing.”

“I told you.” He pulled the lever back on the rifle again and then lowered it, walking slowly in her direction. “You know, I… I was a police detective, before the outbreak. I actually had training way back in the day.”

“You’re shitting me.” She took another deep breath before laughing. “An ex-cop that doesn’t like guns… imagine that.”

“Well. In fairness, it was mostly a desk job.” He walked up beside her, stashing the rifle away behind him. “Are you okay…?”

“Yeah, I’m fine,” she groaned. “I just… fucking _hate_ those things.”

“I’ve never actually seen one up close before. A stage four infected?”

“Yeah. Bloaters. They suck.”

“I picked up on that.”

Ellie rubbed her sore neck with one hand. It was thoroughly bruised now, though she figured she was probably lucky to have gotten away with only that much.

Ben was staring off to the side now. His gas mask was dented from where the bloater had shoved him, and the plastic eye piece had disconnected, leaking spores in.

“My mask…” He reached for it with one hand and peeled it off his face, then tossed it to the floor. “Useless…”

He took a deep breath, spores filling his lungs. No reaction. He could breathe as well as Ellie could. Experiencing it for himself left him at a loss for words.

Ellie smiled at the sight of it. “See? Not so bad, right?”

He shook his head, breathing it in deeply, over and over. “I… I can’t believe… after all this time…”

“It’s okay. This is a good thing. Now we know for sure, right? That you’re like me. You’re immune.” She rested her palms back on the floor, staring at him. “I have to say. Seeing someone else breathing spores… it _is_ kind of amazing…”

“It’s one thing to hear that I’m… immune… but this is something else entirely. I’ve been living for years trying desperately to avoid getting bitten, trying desperately to make sure I never breathed in the spores…”

“I know. But… you know. There’s no other way to find out. You’re not immune until you are.”

“We really are the luckiest people alive.”

Ellie lowered her eyes. “Yeah, well. All the more important for us to find the Fireflies, then.”

“This could really mean something.”

“…Yeah.”

Her fingernail traced along the ground as she thought about it. Her chest felt heavy for a moment. She was thinking about Jackson again.

Ben watched her with a frown. “…Well, listen. If you found the keys, I think I have a vehicle for us. One of these vans is in really good condition.”

“I found the keys. They’re in the security booth over there.”

“Okay, good. Then the only problem is battery. The vehicles have all been in here for a couple years now. Every single one of them will have a drained battery. We’ll just need to hope they can still hold a charge. All we can really do is take it for a drive and hope for the best.”

“Sounds good to me. Let’s get the fuck out of here…”

“I’ll go find the keys for the van. See if you can find that release cord for the garage door so we can get it open.”

“You got it.”

Nodding to himself, Ben stepped away from her to find the security booth. Ellie finally got to her feet, though it strained her at first.

She made her way over to the garage door, which now had an enormous dent from where the bloater had slammed into it. The thing had rattled the whole door, leaving it hanging loosely from the ceiling. She tapped one finger against it, gently, just to test it, and the door instantly fell apart, dropping from its chain in a heap of metal sheets and letting in a sudden, intense burst of sunshine.

She looked at her finger with pursed lips. “…Well, that works.”

It took a long time for the two of them to actually get the van out onto the open road. Ben sat in the driver’s seat while Ellie struggled to push the thing out into the base’s parking lot. Despite her insistence that she would rather be behind the wheel, it was pretty well understood between the two of them that expecting Ben to push the van by himself would be a pipe dream.

And so Ellie found herself sweating under the afternoon sun again, tennis shoes digging into the asphalt, hands pressed to the back of the van as she struggled to get the battery restarted. With Ben, naturally, shouting unhelpful advice at her from the comfort of his cushioned seat.

Within a half an hour, the two managed to wheel the van back down the hill and onto the road leading to their exit. The car had eventually sputtered to life, though they would have to drive it for a while to recharge the battery properly.

Ellie slumped down into the passenger seat with a heavy sigh and slammed her door shut, immediately digging around for her water bottle.

“C’mon,” she said with a sigh, throwing her head back to take a much-needed swig. “Let’s get on the road.”

“Okay.” Ben drummed a finger impatiently on the steering wheel. “Put on your seatbelt.”

“I’m good.”

“This car is not moving until that seatbelt is on.” He looked incredulous.

So did she. “…Are you serious right now?”

“Do I look like I’m joking?”

“There’s nobody else on the road. Just drive! I don’t need it.”

“Yes, you do.”

“Just fucking drive, already! C’mon!”

“Ellie. Listen to me.” Ben took a deep breath, looking her intently in the eye, and tightened his grip on the steering wheel. “After what we just survived, I am not letting you die because we have a brake failure. Now, put your seatbelt on.”

“Oh, my god.”

She stared right back at him. He really was not kidding. And so, with an over-the-top sigh, Ellie reached around for her seatbelt and latched it. Only then did Ben start the van off down the road toward the highway.

The whole exchange gave her a little twinge of nostalgia.


	5. Tourists

Miles of nearly empty highway stretched out across western Colorado, surrounded by low hills and dry shrubs, and occupied by a single van, painted with an enormous _FE.D.R.A._ logo and barreling down the road at high speed. The windows were up and the air conditioning was on, and Ellie and Ben were both relieved to be out of the heat.

Ellie had a hand propped up on the dashboard as she leaned down to check the glove compartment, tugging her whole body uncomfortably against the seatbelt as she did so.

“How – ngh – how are you doing on medical supplies?” she mumbled, half paying attention, as she dug through the contents.

Ben shrugged without looking up from the road. “I’m doing okay, why? What’s in there?”

“There’s a first aid kit.” With a grunt, she pulled it out and popped it open, brushing a hand over the contents to inspect them. “Looks like bandages, gauze, antiseptic. Pretty nice find.”

“Great. Worth hanging on to. Anything else?”

“Uh…” She shut the first aid kit and tossed it to the back seat, returning to the glove compartment. “Bunch of papers, not useful… tire pressure gauge… ooh, a road flare…”

“Might as well stash that. Never know when your flashlight might break.”

“Aw, shit!”

“What?”

“Here.”

“What? What is it?”

Triumphant, she yanked her hand out from the compartment and displayed her prize, a couple of small plastic cases, with a flourish. “Check it out. CDs! Ever wonder what our brave, badass soldiers listen to when they’re riding into battle?”

“What’s that?”

She flipped through the covers. “Uh… Demi Lovato. Avrile Lavigne. The Halican Drops – who are the Halican Drops?”

“Um, I think that’s all teen music.”

“See, that’s surprising, and yet, somehow, not very surprising,” she hummed, popping open the CD case on top. “Alright, Halican Drops it is.”

Without waiting for Ben’s approval, she slid over and inserted the disc into the CD player. The interior of the van burst to life with acoustic guitar at full volume, and both of them recoiled, Ellie scrambling to lower the volume before they lost their hearing.

It wasn’t especially good, not that either of them expected it to be, but it was nice to have something in the background. Neither spoke for a few minutes, just listening.

“Heh.” After a while, Ben gave a smirk, rather absorbed in the music. “Back when Emily was very young, Andrew saved up a week’s worth of ration cards and traded them to a smuggler so he could get her this little handheld CD player for her birthday. She used to play this kind of stuff all the time; she was obsessed with it. I think I have Christina Aguilera’s entire discography permanently etched into my brain because of it.”

“Yeah, I used to have a Walkman that I carried around with me. Man, I kinda miss it…” Ellie leaned against the car door with a sigh, resting her head on her hand. “Had a record player, too, back home. Had a pretty nice collection.”

“You had a record player? In Boston?” He glanced at her over his shoulder with surprise.

“Boston? No, no. This was in the place I lived up north. Uh… it was a… little farmhouse, up in Wyoming.

“Oh. That sounds nice,” he replied softly. “You people living outside the quarantine zones really have it all, don’t you?”

Ellie took a while to answer, staring out contemplatively at the plains rolling by. “If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that the people living in the zones wish they were living outside, and the people living outside wish they were living _inside_.”

“The grass is always greener.”

“Yup.”

Ben gave a curious nod. “Well, you’ve lived on the inside _and_ the outside. Where do _you_ wish you were living?”

“Oh, you couldn’t _get_ me to move back to Boston. No way, man,” she declared. “How about you? Do you miss Denver at all?”

He replied with a shrug. “Living alone has its perks. But I’m not really the sort that does well being left alone in his own head. It gets, well, for lack of a better word, rather lonely… then again, I suppose that doesn’t really have anything to do with the quarantine zone itself.” Ben’s mind was apparently wandering a little now. “I certainly eat better on the outside. But if I’d never left Denver, I also never would have been bitten. Say what you will, but the military really does do a decent job of keeping people safe.”

“Well, sure, if you’re not one of the ones they decide to gun down.”

“I can’t argue with that…”

The point, which Ellie made quite unashamedly, put a sudden damper on the conversation. Ben didn’t seem to have much of a rebuttal, and so the two sat in silence again, save for the continued crooning of the Halican Drops. After another long while, the track on the CD changed, and the sound seemed to pique a sudden interest in Ben, like he’d remembered a question that he’d forgotten to ask.

“Didn’t you say you write music?”

“Did I say that…? Yeah, I mean, sometimes. It’s not, like… I mean, it’s not anything special, but…” Ellie was suddenly a little embarrassed by the admission, in hindsight, though Ben appeared quite sincerely pleased to hear it.

“Oh, I’m sure it’s great. Don’t be hard on yourself! There isn’t enough room for that kind of creativity these days. I think it’d be nice to imagine that one day we might have popular musicians again.”

“I think so, too. I’ve always wished I could see someone in concert. Like, a _real_ concert. I mean, recordings are great and all, but it’s just not the same as live music.”

“Oh, I totally agree. _Totally_ agree. I miss it…”

“Did you go to a lot of concerts? Back in the day?”

“Absolutely. My parents were Deadheads. They dragged me along to concerts from the time I was a little boy. Of course, everyone was on LSD back then… but even still, it was fun.”

“What’s a Deadhead?”

He briefly considered explaining before swiftly giving up. “Eh… nothing. Fans of a really old band.”

“If you say so.” Ellie moved on from that quickly. “Did you have a favorite artist?”

Ben was ready for that question, and grinned at the opportunity to talk about it. “Oh, Bruce Springsteen for sure. I know that’s cliché, but… ugh. _Born in the USA_ was my very first album. I was thirteen when I got it.” He leaned his head back against the headrest, waxing nostalgic. “I would give my right arm for just _one_ Springsteen record.”

Something took Ellie by surprise, and she hesitated, enjoying a pleasant memory.

“Tsch.” She looked away with a snicker.

“What?”

“Someone I knew used to love that song, and he was a barely a baby when it came out. But I used to make fun of him for being old.”

“Well. Everything’s relative, I suppose.”

“Yeah.” The thought passed. Ellie found herself smiling. “You know, I can do _Born to Run_ on guitar.”

“Is that right? You play guitar, then?”

“Uh huh.” She pursed her lips, staring down wistfully at her hands. “…Well, I used to be able to. I can’t, really, anymore. I can’t… hit all the notes, so. Maybe I could relearn it left-handed or something, but… I dunno.”

“I’m sorry; that’s a shame…” Frowning, he looked over his shoulder at her again, focusing on her gloved hands. “Your injury… when did that happen?

“Last year.”

“Was it… an accident, or…?”

“I don’t really want to talk about it.”

“Oh. Okay, then. I’m sorry.”

The van rumbled as it passed over a dirt patch overtaking the highway. Ben glanced over his shoulder a few times to get a better look at Ellie, who, pensive, was staring out the window with a thumb tracing over her the stubs of her missing fingers.

“So… what about you?” He changed the subject a little awkwardly. “Do _you_ have a favorite artist?”

“Oh, I don’t know, man,” she sighed. “It’s too hard to pick just one.”

“Well, hard for _you_ , maybe.”

“Pft.”

She was still looking away, staring out the window, looking for something else to distract her. The music in the background had changed to something cheesy and upbeat, and she tapped her foot to it as the countryside rolled past.

A billboard for a water park, peeling from the sign, proudly advertised that it would be reopening in the spring of 2014. Ellie drummed her fingers on the windowsill.

“So… you went to concerts,” she said. “What else did you like to do, before the outbreak?”

“That’s a pretty broad question.”

“Well, we’ve got time to kill, right?”

“I suppose you have a point.” He peered over at her, giving it quite a bit of serious consideration. “Well, believe it or not, I was quite the collector back in the day.”

“Collector?”

“That’s right. Drove my wife crazy. I used to put out ads in the newspaper, before we had the internet. I drove out to garage sales. It was a pretty demanding hobby.”

“So what kind of stuff did you collect?”

“Oh, all sorts of things. Whatever I thought would appreciate in value. Baseball cards, Beanie Babies, comic books… I actually had some pretty valuable items, relatively speaking. I thought it’d make me rich one day. It’s kind of funny in hindsight.”

“Wait. You collected comics? For real? Cool!” She perked up immediately. “Did you like Savage Starlight?”

“What’s Savage Starlight?”

“Oh.” On cue, she promptly deflated, slumping back into her seat with embarrassment. “Never mind.”

Seeing her enthusiasm vanish like that dismayed Ben a little, too.

He gave it a second thought, then replied with, “When I was a kid, I was a big fan of Captain Shroud.”

With that, he had her attention again. “Captain Shroud?”

“He was this silly pulp superhero from the ‘30s. He would smash through windows and fight evil counterfeiters with a Luger. That kind of thing.” He gave a little chuckle as he recalled it. “His wife was murdered, so he vowed to find her killer by, you know, wearing a leotard and fighting criminals in dark alleyways, or something.”

“Yeah, I mean, that’s what _I_ would do, for sure,” Ellie snickered. “Heh… cool.” She clicked her tongue, leaning back into her seat with her hands folded in front of her. “‘Captain Shroud’. Did he ever actually find whoever killed his wife?”

“Oh, I’m sure he did. Probably a few different times. But they would always find reasons to keep characters around like that,” he explained. “Actually, to be honest, the version I had growing up wasn’t very cool at all. He was a pretty sanitized character in the ‘70s. They had him running around with bolas and a net, tying up criminals and handing them over to the police instead of shooting them.”

“What? That’s dumb.”

“I suppose,” he said with a shrug. “They gave him a reboot in the ‘90s, back when I first started actually collecting. There, he was _very_ violent. I thought it was strange, since it wasn’t what I had grown up with. And the movie was just… just _awful_.”

“Wait, wait, movie? Back up; they made a _movie_?”

“Yes, they did. In the mid-‘90s. And it was terrible.”

“I have _got_ to see this.”

“No, you don’t. Trust me, your life is better for having not seen it.”

“You have no idea how much you are making me want to see it right now.”

They exchanged a glance, and Ben threw his head back, muttering, “I’m going to regret asking this, but the way you say that… have you watched a lot of movies?”

Ellie just laughed in reply.

“…Right.” He took a deep breath, transparently jealous. “Of course you have.”

* * *

The van rumbled to a stop onto a stretch of grass, which had broken out across most of the parking lot of a derelict rest stop. Theirs was the only functional vehicle among a sea of rusted-out cars left behind by a traffic jam a quarter-century ago.

The doors on both sides swung open simultaneously, and out climbed the two passengers, each eager to stretch their legs and get a little air. As Ellie reached her hands above her head, letting out a loud yawn, Ben marched up behind her, taking the opportunity to take a look around the parking lot.

“I think it’s safe to say nobody has been here in a while,” he declared with a nod.

“Really? What makes you think that, the moss growing on the cars?” Ellie stretched an arm out in front of her, amused with herself.

“…That does indeed have something to do with it, yes.” He scratched his chin, unembarrassed. “Let’s say ten minutes for a bathroom break and refueling, sound good?”

“Way ahead of you.” Indeed she was, as she had already begun sifting through the back seat of the van for supplies as he spoke. “I’m going around back. You’re on gas duty.”

“What?” Ben turned around sharply. “Why is that my job?”

“Because I have to go find a comfortable place to squat, while you get to just piss anywhere you want.” She threw the siphon at him, and he fumbled catching it. “You’re on gas duty,” she repeated, leaving no room for objection.

“Okay, okay…”

They broke apart for their separate tasks, though not without Ben grumbling about the unfairness of it all. Ellie headed around for the back of the building with a roll of her eyes.

As she set foot behind the building, her shoe hit an empty can, sending it rolling off the asphalt into the bottom edge of the rest stop’s brick wall. The sight took her by surprise.

Decorating the back of the building was a huge, impressive, sepia-colored mural of a clicker. It was labeled, ‘Freedom.’

Underneath, a skeleton in ragged clothes was slumped against the wall, leaned over a duffel bag full of spray paint cans.

Stricken, Ellie pulled out her journal to make a little sketch of the mural, and then she took a can of spray paint for herself.

She returned to the van a while later, after taking the time to search the small building for supplies, although there wasn’t much to come back with. When she came, Ben was still out in the parking lot, going from car to car in search of enough gas to fill a canister. In the meantime, she leaned back against the van door and just watched him, chewing on a piece of fruit leather from her pack. After the time she’d spent toiling in the heat, pushing the van to get the battery restarted, she found herself rather lacking in sympathy for him.

Eventually, though, the wait got boring, and she shifted around restlessly as he worked his way through the cars in the back. She pushed her back off of the van and paced around in the parking lot, staring off aimlessly. Then she fixed her eyes on the van again, reading the FEDRA logo to herself and feeling a little spontaneous.

Her hand dug into her pack, and she pulled out the spray paint, shaking it up a few times before she approached the side of the van. She added a little addendum above the logo in bold red font: ‘ _FUCK FE.D.R.A.’_

“Heads up, Corporal.”

She stuck the cap back on the spray paint, but then tossed it to the side rather than stuffing it in her pack again. She wouldn’t find a better use for it than that, after all.

Ben returned, lugging his gas canister, while she admired her handiwork. The sight made him frown, and he looked her in the eye as he filled the van’s tank, slightly troubled.

“Did… you ever used to be a Firefly yourself?” he asked tentatively.

Ellie raised an eyebrow. “No. I just lived in a quarantine zone. Isn’t that a good enough reason to say ‘Fuck FEDRA’?” She turned away again, shrugging with both hands. “I’d have thought you’d know where I’m coming from considering you lived in one, too. I don’t know what things are like in Denver, but Boston was a fucked-up place to live.”

He thought about it for a minute. “No, Denver is pretty messed up, too. We had food shortages all the time. Soldiers would do some pretty dire things to keep people under control.”

“Then you know where I’m coming from.”

“I do.”

After finishing his business with the gas can, Ben hoisted it back into the van with an exaggerated groan, then retrieved his water bottle to join Ellie in taking a small break. The entire time, she watched him with a reluctant curiosity.

The most obvious point, she hesitated to make. “…I’m just surprised you aren’t… I dunno, _angry_ at them.”

“I _am_ angry. I don’t have enough time in the _day_ for all the people that I’m angry at,” he professed wearily. “I’ll just put it this way. Like I said, I was a police officer back in the day. And when everything happened, I was in close contact with people in the military while they were getting called in to deal with the infection. When that was going on, I know for a fact that there were some people that really struggled with the kind of things they were ordered to do, that the government said they had to do for the greater good. I went through something like that myself. But I never wanted to hurt anybody.” He lingered on the thought. “I just know that there are people in FEDRA that are doing things they don’t want to do so they can feed their families, just like the smugglers and the criminals and everybody else in the zones. I think it’s important to remember that.”

Winston came to mind. It occurred to her just how long it had been since she’d thought about him last, and she felt a little guilty all of a sudden.

“I guess,” she grumbled. “What did they have you do, then? Did they have you gun people down during food riots or something?”

“No. It was earlier than all that. I mean, it was at the very beginning of the outbreak. I was still on duty as a detective, before they declared martial law. It was so hectic; all boots on the ground, the military had been called in, and our people were getting sent everywhere.” Ben stopped making eye contact as he explained. “So, I got sent to the house of this woman, who… well, the way we talked about it at the time was this: her sick husband had lost his mind. He’d maimed and killed their two children in their sleep. The woman had managed to stop him before he could get her, too, but… she was so… paranoid, or agitated, or something, that she attacked us the moment my partner and I arrived at her place. I don’t know if it was suicide by cop, or what have you, but…”

“Was that the first time you killed someone?”

“It was,” he answered solemnly. “I knew a lot of good people then that were forced to… to make certain decisions. And to face a reality that I don’t think any of us were equipped to handle. It was a… a paradigm shift. Good people were forced to look at the world differently.” He struggled to explain, looking briefly up at her, and then away again. “My point isn’t that I don’t hold FEDRA accountable for what they’ve done. I could never condone what happened to my daughter-in-law, _never_. My point is just that… I believe the people at FEDRA are a part of the new paradigm. They’re a symptom of the world, not the cause. That’s all.”

They went silent, finishing up their little break with nothing but the chirping of birds in the background. Ben turned away again to pack up, but Ellie didn’t move from her spot.

“You’re the one who said ‘the world has changed’,” she said. “Even with all that in mind, you really don’t believe a vaccine will be able to fix things…?”

“I can only speak for myself.” Ben turned around again, sliding shut the back door of the van. “But… with the things that I’ve seen. And the things I’ve done. Returning life to normal… I don’t know what that would even _look_ like. Do you know what I mean?”

“But there _are_ people out there. There are people doing it. Living peacefully.” She was barely even speaking to him anymore; her mind had wandered somewhere else entirely. Still, she took notice of his unsettled reaction.

“You said you lived up in a farmhouse in Wyoming. Right? Is that what you’re talking about? Were you one of those people?” He took a step forward, looking her in the eye.

Ellie’s face fell. “I don’t know.”

They drove away without ever resolving the thought. The wheel of the van bumped a half-empty can of spray paint on the ground, and it rolled underneath a rusted car, vanishing from sight.

* * *

Crickets chirped in the tree line along the edge of the highway, and the van passed by with all its windows down. Ellie was in the driver’s seat now, one hand on the wheel, hanging her elbow out the open window. In the passenger seat beside her, Ben rolled over in his sleep, his loud snoring drowned out by the roar of the engine. She was wide awake, taking deliberate note of every mile marker that passed them by. She’d been driving for hours with the wind in her hair.

Ben rolled over again, tangling himself in his seatbelt, and let out an uncomfortable yawn. “Ellie?”

She kept her eyes fixed dead ahead. “I’m here.”

“What… ahh, what time is it?”

“Late.”

The van rumbled as it passed over a pile of dead twigs. They were driving through an old back country road now, far from the interstate.

He shuffled back with a look of slight concern. “Don’t you want to stop so we can get some rest?”

“I’m good to drive straight through. I’ll sleep later.”

“Are you sure? There’s no rush. If you need to sleep, you might as well.”

“I don’t need to.”

“If you say so.” Slightly troubled, he shifted in his seat, rubbing his palm over his eyes. “How are we doing…?”

“We hit a roadblock on the highway, so I had to turn us around. But we’re still making good time. We’ll cut through Arizona soon; we may pass Las Vegas by morning at this rate.”

“Wow, we _are_ making good time…”

“Yeah, that’s the difference between walking and driving.”

She chewed on her bottom lip. Ben was at a loss for a minute.

“Well, don’t push yourself too hard…” He turned over again. “Los Angeles isn’t going anywhere.”

Her right hand tightened over the steering wheel. Fifteen miles until the next town.

A month ago, she’d been sleeping on the floor of a garage, scavenging for food. Collecting names, but going nowhere.

Ben went back to sleep, and Ellie was left alone in her head again.

The trees kept rolling past, but she never looked up from the road.

* * *

She woke from a nightmare.

Everything had gone quiet. Despite much grumbling from her traveling companion, she had laid down in the back seat that morning to get some sleep, resting her head back against the car door. But when she came to, the car was unexpectedly still.

Birds chirped outside. It was later than she had expected. Apparently she’d needed the sleep.

“Why are we stopped?” She propped herself on her elbows, peering over at the empty driver’s seat. “Ben?”

There was nobody in the car. She sat a little further up, shuffling along the seat to peer out the window, and immediately she had her explanation.

Ben was just outside, standing along the edge of the highway, talking to someone that seemed to be in need of help. A stranger.

Very, very bad news indeed.

“The fuck…?” Her eyes went wide immediately. “Oh, come _on_ , Ben…”

Her hand immediately reached for the handle of her switchblade in her back pocket, which she hid inside her sock almost on instinct. Then she pulled her backpack from between the seats and threw it around her shoulders.

Shaking her head incredulously, she tossed the car door open and stepped outside, moving to approach the pair of them with her hand hovering around the holster of her pistol. “Hey, wait up –!”

A rifle butt smacked her in the back of the head before she could take two steps out of the car, and she fell roughly to her knees, grimacing as the barrel of the gun was thrust in her face. At the same time, the stranger Ben was talking to drew a pistol and drove it into his side, looking back toward Ellie.

“Goddammit,” she hissed, lifting her hands automatically to place them behind her head.

“You, shut up.” The wielder of the rifle stepped around her, keeping it pointed in her direction as he backed up to meet his companion.

Both hunters were young men with similar, muscular builds. The buzz-cut guy that had a gun to Ben was slightly brawnier than his friend, but also more armored up. The one with a gun to Ellie, with shaggy black hair and tattoos going all the way up both arms, only had on a tank top that showed off his biceps. She rolled her eyes at the sight of him.

“That takes care of that,” he grunted, keeping his gun trained on Ellie.

The other gave a subtle nod, glancing back over his shoulder in a few directions. “Where’d Megan go?”

“I’m here!” On cue, a third voice called out from the surrounding woods, and a stocky woman in body armor marched out onto the road to meet the other two. She clutched a rifle of her own in both hands, sighing, “Perimeter’s clear. Looks like it’s just these two. What do you guys want to do? Call it here and head back? Or keep waiting?”

“That van’s in great condition. This is a good haul,” replied the brawnier man with a click of his tongue. As he spoke, he kept his eyes on Ellie, considering. “Hey, she’s cute!”

Ellie narrowed her eyes. “Bite me.”

That little jab clearly got under the skin of the black-haired hunter, but the one she was actually speaking to wasn’t bothered in the slightest.

“Ha!” He shot a look at his companions again. “She’s young… you guys thinking what I’m thinking?”

Megan shrugged halfheartedly. “I mean, it’s Brett’s call. But if you want my opinion, we could really use an extra pair of hands, rather than just dumping her in the silo, if _that’s_ what you’re saying. We don’t really have the resources for that.”

“Well, you’re right; it’s _Brett’s_ call. That’s kind of where my head’s at. You know how he is. He had this weird thing with his ex. He’s been talking for months about how he has a thing for redheads. He’s gonna love this.”

She scoffed at that. “Fucking Brett.”

“Hey, I’m not judging. I’m just saying.”

“Yeah, well, I _am_ judging. It’s creepy, man. He spends, like, eight hours a week in there. He needs to get his shit under control.”

“Well, whatever. Either way, it’s good news for us. That’s all I’m saying.”

”Yeah, you might have a point…”

Ben was dead silent at this point, far from sharing Ellie’s lack of inhibition about speaking while there was a gun on him. Still, his eyes met hers, panicked and apologetic. Ellie flashed him a frown.

“I say we get rid of ‘em,” the black-haired one interjected. “The van and their supplies are plenty. Old man’s useless, and she’s got a mouth on her. Bitch is more trouble than she’s worth.”

In Ellie’s experience, hunters were pretty easy to get into the heads of. And it was pretty easy to spot the weak link.

She looked him in the eye without lowering her hands from her head. “You want to fucking test that?”

His nostrils flared at the challenge. “Alright, someone needs to gag this chick.”

“Oh, come over here and try it, bitch.”

“This fucking cunt…” Without thinking, he raised his rifle to jab it in her direction, and immediately his companion beside Ben, buzz cut guy, moved a hand to lower it again.

“Dude.”

“Are you hearing this shit?” scoffed the shaggier hunter.

“Just grow some thicker skin! Jesus. You’re acting like an amateur. You’re gonna let some tourist rattle you?” He rolled his eyes in his companion’s direction, then leaned past him to shoot Ellie a harsh look. “Seriously though, shut the fuck up or we _will_ gag you.”

The black-haired one grabbed his arm, pulling him in close to hiss, “I can handle this shit! Don’t babysit me.”

“Then fucking chill out and listen to me, already.” He pinched the bridge of his nose with his spare hand, keeping his pistol pressed against Ben with the other. “I’m saying it’s about long-term value. She’s worth way more to us alive than dead. Brett doesn’t care if she’s giving us lip; hell, he _likes_ that shit.”

“Christ.”

As the two bickered, Megan began wandering a bit further out from them, peering down the highway through the sights of her rifle. “Look, whatever you two assholes are gonna do, just hurry up and do it before more fucking tourists come through here. I’m getting antsy.”

The comment drew the ire of the black-haired one, who immediately shifted his attention to her, earning an eye-roll from the other. “That’s not my problem, Megan! Just keep an eye out and wait; we’ve still got shit to sort out.”

Megan was unimpressed. “Yeah? And who put you in charge of this patrol?”

“Who put _you_ in charge? You haven’t been here half as long as either of us. We’re trying to make the right call here.”

“Then talk to Brett! It’s not your call to make!”

“Oh, I’m so fucking sick of hearing everyone hide behind Brett like they don’t have a goddamn mind of their own–!”

They were wholly focused one each other now, and Ellie caught the opportunity immediately. As soon as eyes were off of her, she stood and drew her pistol from its holster, instantly firing off her gun into the crowd and hitting the woman twice in the back, dropping her. The hunters reacted faster than she expected, though, and Ellie swiftly got a bullet through the left leg from the shaggy one’s rifle, dropping her to her knees again with a grunt of pain. Her pistol fell to the ground further away from her, out of reach.

The bigger one had his pistol raised in both hands, but before he could decide what to do, Ben jumped him from behind, wrapping a hand around his chest. It was a futile effort, one that Ellie’s eyes immediately widened at.

“Get the fuck off me!” The hunter drove his elbow into Ben’s ribs to get him to stumble back, then whipped around, beating the older man in the face several times with the butt of his pistol. Ben fell to the ground with a limp moan, bleeding from his face.

Meanwhile, Megan let out a groan and knelt from the ground, apparently unharmed, for the most part. She felt around to retrieve her rifle before the black-haired hunter helped her to her feet again.

“You good?” he grunted.

She winced before responding, taking his hand and struggling to her feet. “Yeah. Yeah, I’m good. Fuck. Caught my vest.” As she turned around, she shook her shoulders out, holding her rifle idly as she looked Ellie over. “This is what I’m saying. She’s tough. She might be nice to have around at camp.”

“We can talk about it with Brett. Let’s just take care of this shit, already. I’m tired.” The burly one, still standing over Ben, pointed his gun straight down, about to finish the job. Ellie’s eyes shot wide open.

“Wait!” She cried out without thinking, making as much of a fuss as she could without taking her hands off her head again. “ _Wait!_ Don’t kill him!”

He let out a huff, shooting a look at the black-haired one. “…Okay, someone gag her.”

“If you let him go, I’ll go with you willingly!” Ellie said it as fast as she could, all the sting gone from her voice.

Her leg was burning, but she barely noticed it.

The black-haired one laughed out loud, taking a hand off of his rifle to shrug. “Who cares? Nobody gives a fuck if you go willingly or not.”

She swallowed. “Well, you don’t want to mess up my pretty face, right? If I don’t go willingly, you better believe you’re gonna have to beat the shit out of me first.”

It was a very transparent, very desperate gambit. Her eyes moved from one of the men to the other, demanding a response.

To her surprise, the one standing over Ben actually hesitated. “I gotta be honest, that’s actually a decent point. It’s better if she’s cleaned up before Brett and the others see her.”

Predictably, the other one, now Ellie’s best friend, was in disbelief at that. “You can’t be fucking serious. She’s just playing you.”

He stepped off of Ben, who struggled to pull himself up onto his elbows. “So what if she is?” the larger hunter barked. “I don’t give a fuck about the old man; do you? He’s a hundred years old! What, is he gonna help scavenge for supplies? Who cares if he gets away?”

“These two are probably from a bigger group. He could come back with others.”

“He wouldn’t survive long enough to get back to wherever he came from. Look at that van they took here. You think he’s just gonna limp home on foot? We’re taking all his shit anyway.”

“Jesus. You’re telling me you are seriously willing to go to bat for this fucking smug tourist?”

“No, what I’m _telling_ you is, the last group that brought in a chick that looked like that hasn’t been picked for highway duty in six fucking weeks. Between her and the car, we’re goddamn miracle workers for this haul.” He leaned in close, muttering in a low, harsh tone that was perfectly easy to overhear. “The silo’s almost empty. We’ve got, like, two left, after we lost Amber last month. They were talking about moving fucking _Priya_ in there after she tried to run. If that’s not desperate, I don’t know what is. I’m telling you, man, this is a big find.” He patted the other hunter on the other arm to reassure him. “You’ll get your turn with her. Just be patient. Don’t ruin this for us.”

Reluctantly – _very_ reluctantly – the other one halfheartedly conceded, taking a step back to let him take charge. “Goddammit.”

He did so immediately, approaching Ellie with his pistol raised, presumably to ease the negotiations along. “Alright. Here’s what we’re gonna do. You, drop your backpack, take five steps ahead of it, fold out your pockets, put your palms on the ground.”

Ellie shook her head. “Release him first. Then I will.”

She stared him down forcefully, and he rolled his eyes.

“Okay.” He took a step back to shove Ben with his foot. “Get up. Get the hell out of here. You stick around, or come anywhere near here again, we’ll shoot you on sight. You get that?”

Ben was still in the process of wiping blood from his face. He moved slowly, straining to get to his feet on his own. “I… y – yes, I understand…” he mumbled, disoriented and terrified.

He stared down the barrel of the hunter’s gun, then turned his whole body to the side, looking over Ellie with dread.

There wasn’t much she could say to reassure him, but there was a more important matter at hand, anyway. She looked back at him with a manufactured calm. “They only need one of us. Don’t worry about me.”

“I…”

Before Ben could finish, he had a gun shoved in his face again. “Both of you, shut the hell up. Don’t make me repeat myself.”

Obediently, Ben stumbled a few steps further down the highway, raising his hands behind his head again, and continued on until he was out of sight.

The hunter was mostly irritated about the whole affair. He turned his gun back to Ellie, and with a dejected frown, she did as he’d demanded, leaving her backpack on the ground and her pockets turned out, and she pressed her palms into the dirt.

“That holster on your leg,” he said when she was finished. “Take it off; toss it behind you.”

She did as he said, tossing it to the ground somewhere by her backpack.

“Put your hands on your head.” He turned to the black-haired one again and gestured toward her. “Okay, pat her down.”

“Me? Why don’t _you_ do it?”

“Can you stop complaining and just do it? Fuck, dude.”

“I don’t like this.”

“I don’t fucking care. Just do it.”

Muttering to himself, black-haired guy did as he was instructed, hanging his rifle off of his backpack behind him as he moved over to Ellie. For half a second, she considered taking the opportunity to run for it, but Megan still had a gun trained on her. Bad odds.

The hunter patted her down roughly and found nothing. “Hands behind you.”

She sat up straight to tuck her arms behind her back. He knelt to manipulate her wrists, tightening a zip tie around them. Ellie gritted her teeth.

Watching impatiently, the bigger hunter tucked his pistol back into its holster as soon as her hands were bound, shooting his companion a look. “Megan and I will take the van over to the east checkpoint. You take her out back by the silo. Then I’ll get Brett, and we’ll meet you there. Got it?”

“Fine.” The one standing over Ellie yanked her up to her feet by her upper arm. “Don’t take too long.”

“Alright. See you there.”

The other two headed for the van, apparently having stolen the keys from Ben already. Soon, it took off down the highway in the opposite direction from where Ben had headed, and Ellie was left alone with only a single captor, wrists bound behind her.

He grabbed her by the back of the neck, looking her in the eye with a scowl. “Well, what do you know?” he taunted. “Looks like it’s just you and me, now.”

* * *

A set of buildings broke through the trees after a long walk. The black-haired hunter dragged Ellie along impatiently by her upper arm, and she nearly tripped over her shoelaces trying to keep up with him. She chafed her wrists tugging them against their restraints, to no avail.

“Is ‘the silo’ as fucked up as it sounds?” she grunted.

“Oh, you just wait and see, bitch.” He tugged on her hair to yank her head back, then shoved her forward, just to make her fall forward on her knees.

As he hoisted her up again, she grunted, “I guess you’re just the water boy then. Do you do foot rubs? Brett must love that.”

He stopped in place for a second just to shoot her an incredibly satisfying look of exasperation. “I knew this was a stupid fucking idea.”

He tugged her along through the grass. The hunters’ territory was evidently quite large, as the small buildings in the distance were the only ones nearby, only connected to a road that snaked off to somewhere else. This whole area was off quarantined by itself behind a barbed wire fence, which the black-haired hunter led Ellie through the gate of.

They circled around to the back of the building, where he fumbled to open a heavy, industrial steel door. In the clearing around back, there was a single grain silo, partly covered with ivy from the outside. Ellie’s stomach churned at the sight of it, but she’d die before she let that show on her face.

The back door of the building opened up into a dark, narrow hallway with a tile floor. It smelled like antiseptic. He shut the door behind them, sliding an iron bar into place to barricade it behind them. Then he grasped at her arm again and tugged her into the main room.

It was a little waiting area; quaint, when devoid of context. There was a tiny round table and chair in the corner, with an unlit candle for light. The end of the room had a metal shelf full of assorted supplies. Then she saw the little open book, and the ring of keys, and she realized what this room was actually for – a check-in station, for people headed to the silo.

“Sick of this shit.” The hunter tossed her against the wall and marched further inside, grabbing the key ring off the shelf and moving to write his name down.

His back was finally turned. A bead of sweat rolled down Ellie’s forehead, and she pressed her back to the wall, raising one leg behind her so she could reach for her foot. The little lump in her sock, she found immediately. The hunter grumbled under his breath in front of her.

She fumbled with the switchblade in her hands, positioning it carefully between her wrists, taking care to be as quiet as possible.

The ziptie broke. The hunter perked up. Before he could react, she charged him, plunging her knife into his kidney from behind.

“ _Fuck_!” He gave a horrible groan as she pulled the knife out, stumbling awkwardly back and turning to face her. Blood spurted out under his shirt. He stared her dead-on, teeth gritted, with fire in his eye. “You… you fucking…!”

She stabbed him again, the knife sliding in cleanly through his shirt. She thrust it into him as fast as she could, her whole body pumping with adrenaline – once, then again into his stomach, gripping his shoulder with her other hand. Then she raised her arm to go for his throat. At the last second, he shifted out of the way, and she got him right under his collar instead. He cried out with pain. Ellie’s heart was pounding.

Before she could stab at him again, his hand shot out to defend himself, and he grabbed hold of her wrist, straining to hold the knife back in spite of his much larger build, thanks to the searing pain of his fresh wounds.

He took the first opening he got and kicked her in her shot leg, then lurched his whole body forward, headbutting her in the face to knock her backward. He had the momentum now, and he used it to push his entire weight against her, running her all the way back across the room until her back slammed into the wall.

Her head was ringing. She spat in his face to disorient him and then stabbed for his throat again, but he intercepted it. This time, he turned it around on her, driving her own switchblade into her chest while her fist was still clenched around it.

She was shrieking now; her eyes shut tight, her breath short. She grasped for his belt, desperate. A hand gripped her hair by the roots and yanked her head forward, then bashed it against the wall behind her. A few times, just for good measure.

Her legs gave out. She stumbled to the floor, choking, grasping at the knife in her chest. As she fell, his gun, which she’d only just managed to wrap her fingers around, slipped from its holster.

The hunter didn’t notice. He loomed over her, both hands pressed tight to his stab wounds. He was losing blood fast – faster than she was. Craning her neck up, she could see it trickling out of his clothes, darkening his shirt with deep red spots.

“F – fucking… I fucking knew…” he gasped, his knees shaking. “Fucking bitch… I knew you were going to… f – fuck…!”

He stumbled away from her, returning to the shelf on the other side of the room and nearly collapsing on top of it. Ellie’s head was spinning. The muscles in her chest were tightening around the knife, burning…

She could hear her own breath. Her hand tightened around the gun she’d grabbed from him, but she was still struggling to get a handle on it when the hunter returned with a lead pipe from the shelf, smacking her full-force across her face.

She hit the floor, her blood splattering onto the tile. The gun clattered a few feet away. He didn’t even seem to notice, being wholly preoccupied with his own intense pain.

She struggled to sit up again, reaching desperately for the gun. She couldn’t even remember where she was; she was operating entirely on instinct now. Her nose was broken, and she could feel the blood trickling out of it, stinging against her split lip.

The hunter paced around the room with booming footsteps, letting out a desperate cry as he pounded a fist against his stomach wounds. “Fuck! Fuck! You’re gonna die… you’re gonna fucking die…”

Her hand found the gun on the floor again. She pulled it in close, practically cradling it. Her vision was blurry. Her shirt felt wet. Everything was darker now; it was so hard to see.

He stumbled back over to her, sucking in panicked breaths. She raised the pistol to him, aiming for his head. For the first time, he realized that she had it.

Then he looked her in the eye. For just a moment, fear flashed across his face, drowning everything else out. She recognized the look. She knew it so well. And she froze.

He just stood there, caught off-guard, blood dripping out from underneath his hand as he clutched his wounds. Her finger quivered over the trigger. Her eyes drifted down to the pipe in his hands, stained with her own blood, dangling loosely above her.

A name came to her. One she acutely remembered adding to the list in her journal, months ago.

_Nora_

She faltered, and her gun lowered for half a second.

Then the pipe cracked across her face again.


	6. Life Out There

Someone was calling out for Ellie.

She could hear it, and she knew in the back of her mind that she should respond, but for some reason, her own name just drifted past her, in one ear and out the other.

It was cool outside. The sun was just beginning to set behind the mountains, giving the whole sky a rich orange hue.

She was watching the clouds swirl, staring past them.

A hand touched her back, and she jumped.

“Ellie?”

Startled, she lurched forward against the overturned barrel she was sitting on and turned to find Dina looking back at her, her black hair in a bun and her sleeves rolled up.

“Oh… sorry.” Ellie flashed her a little apologetic smile, but she got a pout in return.

“Is something wrong?”

Dina’s hand ran gently down her back to soften her own concerned expression a little bit.

There was a certain kind of look she gave from time to time. Ellie had never really noticed it from her until JJ was born. It was disarming – warm, but intense, somehow. Protective, in a way Ellie, guiltily, felt a little undeserving of.

“No…” Ellie turned away, scratching self-consciously behind her ear. “No, I’m good.”

“I was calling for you.”

“Yeah, sorry. I got distracted, I guess.”

Dina pouted at the halfhearted response, leaning in and resting both hands on the barrel beside her. “What are you doing? Just hanging out?”

“Yeah. Just…” Ellie raised a hand, limply gesturing out toward the field in front of them. “Y’know. Thinking.”

“Wow, you do that?”

“I know, it’s shocking.”

The hand traced its way up her back and rested comfortably on her shoulder.

“So, what were you thinking about?”

“Eh… nothing. It’s not important.”

“Mkay.”

Dina blew a little puff of air, pushing a curl of hair out of her eyes. The hand she had on Ellie’s shoulder slowly trailed its way downward, past Ellie’s short sleeve, and rested softly on her bare upper arm.

The barrel creaked slightly as Dina rested her free hand on it, breaking into a grin as she descended on her girlfriend. Ellie could feel her smirking as she nestled herself between Ellie’s head and shoulder, grazing her nose lightly under her ear, breath warm against her neck. She planted a few kisses there, chuckling playfully under her breath.

“Mm…” Goosebumps ran up Ellie’s back, and her lips curled upward with affection. “Where’s the little guy? Did you…?”

“He’s asleep. I put him back in his crib.”

“Again? Didn’t he just have his nap, like, an hour ago?”

“Yeah, well, he’s three months old. He sleeps a lot.”

As she said that, she leaned in more securely against Ellie’s back, and her arms snaked around her torso, cupping her hands together around her stomach.

Her chin perched on Ellie’s shoulder, Dina let out a comfortable sigh, and she hummed, “What can I do to make you happy today?”

That immediately earned a smile.

“Aw. You’re nice.” Ellie pulled in her hand to rest it over top of Dina’s.

“I know, right?”

They snuggled closer together, and Ellie shuffled over in her seat to get more comfortable. She closed her eyes, enjoying the warmth of the body heat against the cool outside air.

“Okay, well,” she started, giving it a moment’s thought, “If you mean it, I actually do kind of have something I was thinking about asking you to do. But I felt a little awkward about it.”

“Ooh, this sounds interesting. Okay, shoot.”

She moved to the side to separate from Dina a little, turning her head to look her in the eye. “How would you feel about modeling for me?”

Dina’s hands parted, and she raised her eyebrows, taken by surprise. “Modeling?”

“Yeah. Y’know, like, for a painting. I’m trying to use the studio more.” Ellie turned back with a shrug.

“So, you mean you just want me to sit in place and look at you? Sure, I can do that. I’d have thought you’d take the opportunity to ask me to do something more interesting.” She pursed her lips. “Do I have to take my clothes off?”

Ellie let out an embarrassing snort before she could stop herself, which she could just _feel_ Dina enjoying without even having to look. “Well, that isn’t what I had in mind, but, hey, if the offer’s on the table…”

She was quite proud of that deflection.

“Pfft.”

Dina stood up straight again, and she crossed her arms, standing to the side with her eyes tracing thoughtfully over Ellie’s face. The attention made her a little self-conscious, admittedly, and she peered off in the opposite direction, weakly pretending she didn’t know it was happening.

“Ellie?” said Dina.

“Yeah?”

“I like you.”

The whole barrel creaked as Ellie turned again, this time with one eyebrow raised. She lifted a foot to prop one leg up next to her, resting her elbow on her raised knee. And then she returned the look, focusing curiously on the deep brown in her eyes. “…What are you doin’?”

Dina frowned. “What do you mean, what am I doing?”

“Why are you acting weird?”

“I’m not acting weird.”

Ellie’s fingers drummed on her knee. She looked down, staring at the grass. “I just hope you’re not worrying about me.”

“I’m not.”

At that, Dina trudged forward and slid onto the barrel right beside Ellie, patting her on the knee to get her to scooch over as she took a seat. They sat side-by-side together for a while in a comfortable silence.

Ellie couldn’t help but relax a little. It was nice to have someone to enjoy the view with; nicer still to have someone she didn’t feel the need to mindlessly fill the silence with. But there was still something on her mind.

She watched the clouds again. Something stirred in her, and she let her guard down a little.

“Do you think there’s life out there?”

Dina shot her a quizzical glance. “What, you mean, like… in space?”

“Yeah. I mean, do you think we’re alone in the universe? Back before the outbreak, astronomers used to say, like, it’s totally possible that there’s life way out in a distant galaxy somewhere. But the distance would probably be so great that we could never contact each other, even if we could somehow send a message out at the speed of light. We wouldn’t ever know for sure. It would just be a mystery, forever.”

She looked over with an enthusiastic, almost hopeful expression, but it was clear from her face that Dina didn’t get it.

“…Are you high? ‘Cause if you have weed and you’re not sharing, I’m gonna be upset.”

“No, I’m not high! God! I’m just… I dunno. Whatever.” Discouraged, Ellie looked away, kicking at the dirt with her shoe. “You asked me what I was thinking about.”

That reaction put Dina off immediately.

Apologetic, she touched a hand to Ellie’s forearm, nodding as she thought about it a little more. “No, I get it. You’re just feeling, like…”

“Kinda… small, I guess. I dunno.”

Dina pursed her lips thoughtfully. She seemed a little fired up about something, all of a sudden.

“Well. You shouldn’t.” She nudged Ellie’s side to get her to make eye contact again. “You know what _I_ think is cool to think about?”

“What’s that?”

“I think it’s cool that… of all the times and places that either of us could have been born, across the entirety of human history, for thousands of years… we _both_ happened to be born at just the right time, and just the right place, so that the circumstances of both our lives would end up leading us both to Jackson, just we could meet. When you think about it, all the random chemical processes in the universe that had to take place in _just_ the right way in order for that to happen. It’s mind-blowing. Right? I mean, how amazing is _that?_ ”

She reached over to Ellie’s lap so they could hold hands. Ellie was too distracted by what she’d said to pay it much mind.

Her eyes drooped. “You mean, you think it’s, like, fate, or something.”

“…Sure. Whatever you want to call it.”

“You know I don’t really believe in that stuff.”

“Yeah, I know.” Dina brushed their shoulders together. “Still, though. I mean, you don’t think we’re… like, soulmates?”

“Nope.”

Ellie kissed her hand.

“You’re so romantic,” snickered Dina.

“It’s part of my charm.”

They lingered on it for a moment, hand-in-hand. Dina smirked at the exchange. Ellie just liked watching her.

Then she began to turn away, fingers trailing from Ellie’s wrist as she did. “I’m gonna go in. I want to get dinner started.”

“It’s my turn for dinner.”

“That’s okay.”

Ellie sighed. “ _Dina_.”

“Babe. Please.” She prodded Ellie in the shoulder. “I’m being nice. Just let me be nice, okay?”

Their eyes met. She was gentle, but uncompromising. She still had that look.

“…Okay.” Ellie relented, rubbing a hand behind her neck. “Uh… do you need me for anything?”

“Nah. You’re good. I’ll call for you, if you’re still out here when it’s ready.”

“Alright. Thanks…”

With that, Dina stood from the barrel, touching Ellie lovingly on the arm one last time before setting off into the yard toward the house.

Something about that didn’t quite sit right. Ellie stared at her feet, digging them uncomfortably in the dirt.

“…Hey, wait.”

“Hm?”

She stood up and stepped into the grass, leaving Dina standing there in anticipation as she followed behind. They looked each other intently in the eye, and Dina raised an eyebrow expectantly in her direction. Ellie opened her mouth to say something, but she stopped herself at the last second.

And then, without warning, she marched right up to Dina, cupped her hands around her face, and pulled her into a deep kiss, taking her completely by surprise.

Dina’s eyes flew open, and she took a sudden step back, laughing breathlessly against Ellie’s lips as she steadied herself.

Ellie didn’t laugh. Her gaze was intense, swelling with a passion that had overcome her out of nowhere. When they broke apart, Dina seemed stricken by it.

She cracked an infectious grin, brushing Ellie’s bangs out of her eyes before sliding her arms forward to rest them on her shoulders. “Just wanted to get that out of your system?”

“I love you.”

Dina took a deep breath. “I know.” She pulled herself in closer, arms closing together behind Ellie’s neck to touch their foreheads to each other. “I just feel like I lose you sometimes.”

Ellie closed her eyes uncertainly, shifting slightly in Dina’s arms, their noses brushing together.

Her ears rang.

Her forehead was freezing all of a sudden. Dina’s fingers traced the back of her neck. She opened her eyes.

Gunshots were going off outside.

No, her eyes were still closed – she wrenched them open again.

Everything was burning.

Her face was pressed against the tile floor. She blinked twice. Blood was forming in a pool under her head. She could feel it streaming down her cheeks. She rolled over onto her side.

On the floor directly across from her, there was the dead body of the hunter she’d stabbed, leaking blood from the stomach. She stared into his dull eyes, the whole room at a ninety-degree angle.

She drove both hands into the floor, but one caught the pool of blood underneath her and slipped, and she hit the ground again, hard. She was panting through her open mouth. Her breath was audible, squeaking like her lungs were leaking air.

Something was tight in her chest. Her hand worked its way up her torso to grasp for it – it was her switchblade, still buried in her flesh. Hand shaking, she clenched a fist around it and yanked it out in a single motion. The blade dragged roughly against her flesh, and blood leaked from her like a sieve, spilling into her shirt and flowing down the side of her torso to add to the pool. The sound of her own cries of pain rang in her ears.

“F- fuck…” she whimpered.

She propped herself up on her elbows. Blood was streaking down her face. It dribbled off the end of her chin in tiny droplets. Smacking her lips, she could taste it.

Her arms shook as she planted her hands on the ground again. She felt around for the dead hunter’s gun and tucked it into her waistband. Then she focused her efforts on trying to stand.

This time, with a herculean effort, she managed to force herself all the way to her feet. Before she could even stand upright, though, she’d already lost her balance, and had to stagger backwards to lean against the wall.

Her switchblade was clenched tightly in her fist. She tried to focus her vision on it; it was soaked red. With trembling hands, she tucked it away, back into her pocket. Then she shoved off the wall.

There were dull, dark spots fading in and out of her vision. She could hardly tell where she was. Her hand was buried in her bleeding flesh as she limped out of the room, turning the corner into the entrance hall.

Sunlight shone in from the other side. Ellie winced at it.

A sudden sound made her jump, and she stumbled back against the wall again.

“Hey! Wait! Are you okay? Don’t shoot!” A female voice cried out from down the hall. Someone was hunched behind the doorway, gesturing with one hand.

Ellie yanked the gun from her waistband and fired a shot down the hallway. She could barely see. Blood dripped off her bangs and obscured her vision. The bullet ricocheted off of something but didn’t hit anybody.

“Wait!” The figure behind the door called out again. “Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot! I’m not with them!”

Ellie had the gun clutched tightly. She struggled to keep it raised, and failed.

“I’m coming over! Don’t shoot, please!”

Her hand shook. The figure moved from behind cover. Ellie groaned under her breath.

“Lower your gun, please! I don’t –”

The figure closed in fast – too fast. Ellie let out a shriek, lunging forward and swinging with the butt of her pistol. The figure yelped with surprise in return, but overpowered her anyway, shoving her up against the wall with relatively little effort. Ellie’s eyes fluttered shut. Potato was asleep in his crib.

“Hey!” the figure cried out. “Stop! Stop! I’m not with them, okay?”

Her eyes shot open again. Blood trickled down her cheeks and along the side of her nose.

The woman had a soft face. Her hair and skin were very dark. She was beautiful, if skinny. Gaunt, even. Something bad had happened to her. Dina had gone inside to make dinner…

“My name is Priya,” the figure said slowly. “I’m a doctor. Okay? You’re from the silo, right?”

Ellie threw her head back against the wall and spoke directly to her for the first time. “Dina?”

“Priya,” the figure responded, unfazed. “Do you understand? My name is Priya. I’m a doctor. I was captured here, just like you. I’m a _doctor_. I can help take care of you, if you let me. What’s your name?”

“No, no, I… I need to talk to someone,” Ellie replied quietly. “Where… where is…?” It was cool… the air was cool. Her eyes fluttered lightly.

“Do you understand what I’m saying? You’re bleeding severely. It looks like you suffered a head injury. You look really hurt, and you urgently need medical attention. Nod if you can understand me, okay?”

“I understand you.” Ellie slumped back and leaned her head against the wall again. Blood was streaming down her neck, soaking into the collar of her shirt, making it stick to her skin. “Where is Dina?”

“Who is ‘Dina’? I don’t know anybody by that name. Is she from the silo?”

Ellie grasped the figure by her collar. Her vision blurred as she struggled to keep her eyes open. “You don’t understand. We’re looking for the Fireflies, okay? I need to go, now. I don’t have time for this.”

“Okay. Okay, I understand. Try not to close your eyes.” The figure wrapped her hand around Ellie’s wrist, gently loosening her grasp. “Can you lean back against the wall? It looks like you have a stab wound on your chest.” The figure positioned her hand on Ellie’s waist, holding her steady against the wall. “I’m going to lift your shirt and take a look, is that okay?”

Ellie nodded along slowly. Her head slumped to the side a little. “Okay.”

“Good. I’m lifting your shirt now, alright? Can you raise your arms up?”

“Okay…”

Ellie lifted her arms. Priya tucked her fingers under the helm of Ellie’s shirt and raised it up. Ellie giggled, her voice in a low tenor, and tossed it off the side of the couch.

Dina was kneeling over her. Her hand dug into the arm of the couch, and she let out a lovely, breathless laugh, planting kisses on Ellie’s neck. Her other hand slid from Ellie’s torso to her waist. They peered into each other’s eyes – she was striking to look at. Sexy, in that breathtakingly natural ‘Dina’ sort of way.

Ellie forgot where she was. Blood was glazing over her vision. Dina ran a slender hand down her waist and rested it on her thigh. Wavy black hair hung over her face.

And then she stopped, eyes locked with Ellie’s, and pressed her thumb firmly into the skin of her thigh. “Well, hi, there.”

She cracked a coquettish grin.

Of course, Ellie was already smiling, but she couldn’t help feeling foolish, pinned underneath a woman and still trying to carry on a conversation. “…Hi.”

“How are you doing? You good?”

“Y – yeah. I’m good…”

“Comfortable?”

“Yeah…”

“Good. I wouldn’t want you to be uncomfortable.”

That hand was creeping precariously toward the waistband of her briefs.

Ellie arched her back slightly, moving her hand from the couch to Dina’s waist to hold her in place. Her fingers traced over that scar of hers, the one from the accident with the skateboard. The memory of that story made her chuckle; it was a cute one…

And then Dina bit her, and she snapped out of it.

Well, _nibbled_ on her. Just enough to give her a little mark on the side of her neck, to keep the hickey company.

“Dina!” Ellie erupted into a giggle.

The person in question was quite busy ignoring her, trailing kisses down her neck until her cheek brushed up on Ellie’s collarbone. Her hair kept grazing against Ellie’s chin, tickling her and making her shuffle around with embarrassing, jittery laughter.

After a very deliberate pause, Dina’s eyes drifted up to meet Ellie’s again, very unashamedly enjoying the reaction she was getting. “What was that? Sorry, I thought you said something.”

“Stop teasing me, dick!”

“ _Whoa_. There are children in this house. Don’t be so vulgar.”

“Oh, yeah. Wouldn’t want to do anything vulgar…”

The hand hovering around her waist settled firmly on her hip, and Dina shifted her weight further forward until their faces were inches apart.

“You’re blushing. You blush when you get all excited.” She cocked her head to the side affectionately. “ _Damn_ , you’re cute!”

Ellie could feel the blood tingling in her cheeks, confirming every word Dina said. ‘Excited’ was certainly one word for it. This was, without question, the most infuriating person she had ever met.

“Psh.” Her eyes darted to the side. “Maybe I’m just embarrassed by that stupid grin on your face.”

“No… no, I don’t think so,” Dina purred, leaning in to close the last few inches between their lips. She held the kiss for a long couple of seconds before slowly breaking away to tease, “You are _very_ easy to read.”

Ellie traced her tongue along the edge of her bottom lip, smirking in turn. That was something she actually had a retort to. “Well, that makes one of us, then, doesn’t it?”

“I’m sorry?” Dina playfully scoffed. “What is _that_ supposed to mean?”

“Are you kidding me? You’re like the _queen_ of mixed signals. Don’t you dare argue with that.”

“Really? Mixed signals? Is that so?”

She apparently took it as a challenge, and the look in her eye turned just a twinge more severe. She slid back, slowly and deliberately, removing Ellie’s hand from her waist and pinning it to the side of the couch.

They locked eyes again. Her stare was penetrating. Dina – as always, it seemed – knew _exactly_ which buttons to push.

“Are you getting mixed signals, Ellie?”

…Electrifying.

Ellie sucked in her breath. “I don’t –”

Something echoed from elsewhere in the house, quiet at first, but enough to make them both instantly perk up. Crying, coming from upstairs, where JJ had been put to bed, as if on cue.

Dina said what they were both thinking. “…Aw… come _on_.”

Playfully defeated, she let out a groan, burying her face in the collar of her girlfriend, who was still crashing back down to planet Earth, red in the face.

“No, no, it’s… you’re good… tsch.” She touched a hand gently to Dina’s bare shoulder with a chuckle, sliding backward to separate from her a little.

“He woke up.”

“Yeah. I hear that.”

Dina rubbed a hand over her face, reluctant to say it. “…I’ll bet he needs a change.”

“That’s okay.”

“It’s my turn.”

“Yeeup.”

“Can you just give me one second?” she asked with a frown.

“Yeah.”

“I will just be _one_ second. I promise.”

“It’s okay.”

“Okay. Don’t go anywhere. I’m not letting him kill it this time,” Dina declared, lunging forward to peck Ellie quickly on the lips before moving to stand from her. “I mean it. I’m not. I will come right back, and we will get right back to it. Like nothing happened. It will blow your fucking mind.”

“Dina. It’s _okay_. Go change the baby. I’m not going anywhere.”

“Alright, alright. Be right back.” She shoved off the couch, swinging a leg awkwardly around Ellie to step on the floor, and hurried out.

There was a brief pause, and Ellie stared at the ceiling, cheeks still red.

…Then Dina poked her head back in. “Think sexy thoughts!”

“Go! Oh, my god!”

“I’m going! I’m going!”

Her feet creaked on the old wooden stairs as she bounded up them, leaving Ellie, still splayed out on the couch, suddenly in the company of her own thoughts.

With as many times as she’d sketched Dina over the years, she’d almost fooled herself into believing she could capture those eyes.

Almost.

“Hoo, man…”

Ellie took a deep breath to try and collect herself, stretching both arms out in front of her. The room suddenly felt a lot colder without anyone else’s body heat radiating against her.

Sexy thoughts. She patted her hands on her bare legs.

She brainstormed a line to use when Dina returned, whispering to search her voice for the proper low, sultry register, until the prospect of Dina walking in on her doing it became too petrifying to continue.

Upstairs, Dina’s voice echoed from the bedroom. She was talking loudly to the baby, theatrically admonishing him for his bad timing. Ellie chuckled at it as she rolled over on the couch.

A slight breeze outside made the curtains blow. It was just getting to that time of year when it was warm enough to keep the windows open. Of course, it made it a little chilly in the house, but what was the point of moving out of the city if they were just going to shut themselves indoors? That was what Dina had argued, anyway.

She stood from the couch, restless. Dina had quieted down. No noise in the house now but chirping crickets.

At least out in the middle of nowhere, they could be as loud as they wanted. All night long. Ellie pressed her tongue to the inside of her cheek.

Sexy thoughts, sexy thoughts… what was taking her so long?

She wandered over to the table by the window. They’d been using it as a work space; she’d spent most of her afternoon there working on her music. She wanted to finish something in time for Dina’s birthday – it was the only reason she’d actually done a half-decent job of cleaning up after herself. To stop her from seeing any of the lyrics while they were still an embarrassing work in progress.

As she sifted through the papers she’d left behind, her eyes settled on the picture there, and she lost herself for a moment, running a thumb along the edge of the frame.

Talia. Dina talked about her so much, Ellie almost felt like she knew her personally. All her little quirks. The jokes she liked. Her mannerisms. How she would chew on her cuticles when she got nervous, or the particular way her brow would furrow when she recalled a passage from the Torah.

A part of her couldn’t help but wonder if Dina had subconsciously exaggerated some of those memories, just to feel that tiny bit closer to her sister. To make her a little less gone.

But how could Ellie really know? She’d spent most of her childhood alone.

A little gust of wind from outside blew a loose sheet of paper to the floor.

Sexy thoughts.

She moved to the window and reached a hand out to close it, and then she froze, taking one glance outside.

There was a buck in the yard, grazing. A burly one, with antlers as big as its torso. And deep, round, jet-black eyes. At the gentlest sound from inside, it turned its whole neck to look, and Ellie found herself staring it down.

“Oh, shit… cool…!”

Without taking her eyes off of it, she reached for a something to draw on from the table. It stayed eerily still the whole time, looking through her.

There was something powerful about its gaze. Something evocative.

Like pushing through a blizzard.

Ellie’s feet were already carrying her out of the living room.

“Hey, babe?” she called up the stairs. “Have you seen my journal?”

A voice called back down from the upstairs bathroom: “What? What for?”

Ellie didn’t wait around to give an answer. She grabbed the nearest book off the table to use as a writing surface and made her way out onto the front porch, taking a seat there with her feet in the grass and her paper in her lap.

The buck hardly reacted to Ellie’s movements. They were just the right distance away to maintain that uneven truce, just for a little while, while her pencil sketched an outline of its head. Its long snout, and its eyes, and its gnarled antlers, twisting upward like the branches of an old tree. It seemed as interested in her as she was in it. Like it knew something about her.

And then, finally, the stairs creaked behind her, and a pair of footsteps marched up to the front door and stomped out onto the porch.

The buck fled for the other corner of the yard and disappeared behind the corner of the house.

“Shit,” Dina groaned, looming behind her. “The fence must be loose somewhere.”

Ellie rested her pencil. “Yeah. I can take a look at it tomorrow.”

Her little sketch was barely half-finished.

Dina took one glance at it over her shoulder. “You’re a good artist.”

“Thanks.”

“This is what you wanted your journal for?”

“Yeah.”

Dina’s hand rested on her shoulder, gripping it tight for a second. Ellie looked up at her, and she brushed a little hair out of her face, thwarted.

She let out a single, theatrical sigh. “…It’s dead, isn’t it? He killed it again.”

They exchanged a glance.

Ellie shrugged. “…Yeah, kinda.”

“Damn it.” Dina released her shoulder, and then took a step down to take a seat on the porch beside her, arms crossed. “That little cock-blocking asshole. You know I shaved my legs today?”

“Yeah, I noticed.”

“Well, shit, I _hope_ you noticed! I didn’t do it for the sheep!”

Ellie’s eyes fluttered. Her ears were ringing again.

She smiled faintly. “You look good.”

“Thank you,” Dina snickered in response. “Man, the arm-twisting a girl needs to do to get a compliment around here…”

That wasn’t subtle.

“Okay, okay. I get it.” Ellie was already turning to pull her into a kiss as she said it. As they broke apart, she corrected herself: “You look _fucking_ hot. Is that better?”

Dina flashed a smile. “ _Now_ we’re getting somewhere.”

On that note, she moved to stand, using Ellie’s shoulder for support to get to her feet.

The crickets were chirping – buzzing in her ears.

“Let’s go in. Yeah?” Dina suggested, leaning against the wall and looking down at her.

Ellie didn’t move. “Yeah.”

Her muscles throbbed. Something stung against her face. She stared out into the grass.

“You coming, El?”

She felt a hand out behind her. Her shirt kept sticking to her chest, the fabric nipping at her broken flesh.

“Ellie? Did you hear me?”

A twang against metal.

Bullets ricocheted off the hood of the truck they were hunched under. Her hand pressed firmly against the door behind, closing tight into a fist.

“Ellie!” Priya leaned around the side with both hands on her pistol, firing off a few shots before retreating to cover again. “Are you awake?”

“I’m awake.” She rubbed the back of her arm over her face, staining it crimson.

“We need to run. They’re going to flank us. I’ll see if I can’t create an opening.”

“Okay.”

“I need to –” Another gunshot rang out, and a window shattered above them, raining broken glass down at Priya’s feet. She ducked around the edge again and fired another shot before her gun started dry-firing. “Shit!” she hissed, stumbling back around to Ellie’s side. “I’m empty. Give me your gun, quick.”

“Why?”

“Because mine is empty! _Ellie_!”

Ellie let out an unstable breath, her chest heaving.

She focused on Priya’s face, dizzy. “How do you know my name?”

“You _told_ me your name! Give me your gun, _now_!”

“I…” She pulled it from her waistband, tightening her grip on it.

“Ellie. Listen to me. Do you want to die?”

“No…”

“Then give me your gun right now, so I can get us out of this.”

She extended her hand aggressively, and Ellie relented, dropping the gun into her palm. Then she closed her eyes, just for a second…

Gunshots rang out right next to her as she rested her head back against the car door. People were shouting in the distance. Priya’s breathing was panicked, interspersed with sharp, aggressive muttering to herself.

Suddenly, Ellie was shaken into opening her eyes again, and she was startled to find herself face-to-face with Priya, who rested a hand on her shoulder.

“Don’t fall asleep.”

“I’m not,” Ellie groaned.

“We need to move. Can you stand?”

“Yes.”

“Then, c’mon. Hurry.”

As she turned away, she raised her pistol back in the direction the gunshots had come from. Ellie propped herself up on the hood of the truck to follow suit. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the body of the hunter that Priya had shot and killed lying in a pool of blood on the grass.

She shoved off of the hood of the truck to walk on her own, and her legs gave out almost immediately, sending her collapsing into the dirt with a yelp.

Priya looked back over her shoulder and immediately doubled back, gritting her teeth. “Fuck!” she hissed, moving to kneel. “Okay, put your arm around me. Quickly!”

“Okay; I am, I am…!”

“Try to breathe, okay?”

“I _am_.”

There were dark spots in her vision again. She put all her weight on Priya, who shouldered it with some difficulty. Together, the two escaped into the tree line as fast as they could manage.

The minute they were out of sight, Priya led her to the base of a tree and sat her down again, which she did roughly with a pained whimper.

She rested her head back against the tree trunk. One hand dabbed blood from her forehead to stop it trickling in her eyes. “It hurts…”

“I know it does. Just keep breathing.” Priya knelt very close, maintaining eye contact as she reached into her bag for a rag and extended it. “Here. Can you see okay?”

Ellie snatched the rag with a grunt, pressing it to her face. It soaked through in seconds. A stabbing pain rippled through an open wound on her forehead from the contact.

Priya touched her on the arm to get her attention again. “…Ellie?”

“Yeah?”

“Focus on my voice. Okay?” She tilted her head down to make as forceful of eye contact as she could. “Are you listening? What did I just say to you?”

The blood-soaked rag hit the dirt.

Ellie sucked her teeth. “…You said, ‘focus on your voice’.”

“Okay. Good. Now, Brett’s group is swarming the camp around the site of the crash. So the woods should be relatively clear right now,” explained Priya with a glance backward over her shoulder.

“Crash…?”

“Don’t worry about that. It doesn’t matter. What matters is, we’ve got a group of people meeting up to take shelter in the town. I should be able to patch you up there. But we can’t stop until we get there. So I really need you to be with me until then. You have to stay conscious, do you understand?”

“I got it…”

“Good. Because your life depends on it.” She got to her feet, holding out a hand for Ellie to grab. “Here. Take my hand.”

Both of Ellie’s hands clutched at Priya’s arm as she struggled to her feet. As she did, she nearly slipped on the dirt, grasping for Priya’s shoulder to steady herself. “Sh – shit…”

“You’re okay. It’s going to be a straight shot through here. Come on.”

“Okay. Okay…”

They carried on for a few minutes like that. Ellie hated needing help just to walk, but truthfully, she was having a hard time staying on her feet even with somebody to lean on. Her head felt too thick to do anything, even to think. Every muscle in her whole body ached.

Gunshots were still echoing out from the hunters’ camp, now a ways behind them. Both women tried not to look back.

Out of nowhere, Ellie’s leg erupted with a burning pain, and she felt herself lose control, slumping against Priya and propping a hand awkwardly against her side.

“I… just…” She winced, and Priya helped lower her to the ground again. “Just give me a minute…”

“Okay. Take a deep breath. We’re going to make it.” Priya knelt again. Her clothes were stained with Ellie’s blood. With a sigh, she reached back for her bag again and retrieved her water bottle, which she handed off. “Here, drink. You’ve lost a lot of blood.”

Ellie looked somewhere else as she grasped for the bottle. The lid was difficult to open. Priya reached a hand to help, but she swatted it away.

Gunshots still rang out. People were shouting in the distance.

Music. There was music playing.

The lid came off. She clasped the bottle with both hands, raising it to her lips. Water poured down her chin, washing off a sticky layer of blood.

Her mouth tasted like iron. The bottle shook in her hands. Someone was crying. She tapped her bare foot on the kitchen floor.

“Fucking thing…” she grumbled under her breath, adjusting the bottle with both hands.

JJ did not even yet possess the power of speech, and yet somehow he was still capable of sounding passive aggressive.

She tightened the rubber nipple over the bottle with an annoyed grunt, and finally, it stuck. As she made her way upstairs, she pumped her fist in victory.

Music was still playing downstairs when she stepped into the bedroom. JJ was flailing around in his crib; he’d started crying just in the short time it took her to get his bottle ready.

Ellie rested a hand on the side of the crib. “Hey there, tater… I told you I’d be right back, didn’t I? What’re you cryin’ for? C’mere, bud,” she cooed as she leaned down, reaching a hand gently around his back to pick him up.

He immediately rolled over in her arms, grasping at her face as she hoisted him up against her collar.

“That’s okay… that’s alright. I know, I know. I’m not really the person you wanted to see right now, am I? But beggars can’t be choosers. She’s out picking herbs for the grown-ups’ dinner. Lamb chops. Yummy, right?”

As she rocked him, slowly moving the two of them over to the bed to sit, his crying faded, but it was soon replaced with equally restless babbling. She moved her spare hand to his face, turning his chin slightly until she could peer directly into his eyes. She flashed her warmest smile – the one reserved exclusively for him.

He broke eye contact almost immediately. Staring past her, he stretched out his arm and promptly yanked on a strand of her hair, making her flinch. Not the sentimental type, apparently.

Chuckling to herself, Ellie gently cupped her hand over his until he released her, pulling him in closer until he was tight against her chest. Then she lowered the bottle to him.

JJ was not having any of it. The second the rubber nipple touched his lips, he defiantly rolled his head in the opposite direction, forcing Ellie to direct him toward it again.

“Hey, look. I get it. When you want a boob, you want a boob. Trust me, though, dude, you don’t want any of what I got. This stuff is as fresh as it gets. Right from the tap.” She coaxed him along with a grin, her voice dropping half an octave as she eased off her baby-talk voice. And eventually, _eventually_ , he got the message and latched on to the bottle to start eating. “Oh, yeah,” she said with a nod. “Ohhh, yeah. That’s the good stuff. _That_ hits the spot.”

His tiny arms flailed around at his sides at first, but eventually he relaxed and pulled them in toward himself with a drowsy smile. Then one of his hands tightened around Ellie’s two fingers, and a high-pitched sound escaped her lips that she didn’t even know she was capable of making. Her whole face lit up in an instant.

Something about another, tiny heartbeat. Another living, breathing human being, and for him, it was like she was the only thing that mattered in the entire world, even if just for a couple of minutes. Everything else seemed so laughably unimportant by comparison.

They took their time. JJ emptied the bottle.

One of the floorboards outside the bedroom creaked, and Ellie smiled to herself as she noticed it.

“Okay,” she hummed, setting down the bottle and hoisting JJ up over her shoulder. “Up we go. You ready, bud? You gonna burp? Or are you gonna make my life difficult? Huh?” She barely even had to pat him on the back before she got her reply. “Whoa, nelly! Big one!”

JJ, quite satisfied, slumped limply against Ellie’s shoulder. He’d gone very quiet and still, as he always did. She rubbed her hand against his back as he drifted off.

“See…? Bottle’s not so bad, right?” She hugged him close, then hesitated for a second, eyes glancing toward the open bedroom door. Her grin grew a little wider. “I mean, don’t get me wrong; I get it. Your mama has some pretty awesome boobs. I’m right there with you. She’s all modest about it, but you and I know. Yeah. We know…”

Dina was unable to hold back her chuckle from the other side of the room.

“So I’m gonna go out on a limb and guess that you knew I was here.”

“You have big feet, babe. It’s honestly amazing that you haven’t been eaten by a clicker yet. It shouldn’t be possible.”

Cover blown, the intruder marched into the bedroom with her arms crossed, leaning back against the door frame as she looked the pair of them over. “I really can’t leave you two alone for five minutes.”

“What?” snickered Ellie. “We have similar interests.”

“All I ask is that you not be weird around the baby.”

“There’s nothing weird about it! It’s perfectly natural.”

“Oh, my god.”

Quite pleased with herself, Ellie stood abruptly from the bed and carried him over so they could all stand together.

Dina’s eyes followed her the whole way. “Dinner’s gonna kick ass.”

“I bet. I can smell it from here.”

They sidled up next to each other on the wall until their arms nudged together. Dina leaned over and extended a hand to JJ, and he gave a little, sleepy coo as she rubbed him on the shoulder.

Music was still playing downstairs.

“You fed him, then,” said Dina.

Ellie frowned. “Yeah. You were… in the middle of something, so. I just figured.”

“You know, you can always come and get me if he’s hungry. He’s priority number one, obviously. I don’t mind dropping what I’m doing.”

“I know, I know. But we’ve got dinner on, and you, like, just pumped, so…” She shuffled around self-consciously, peering down at the baby in her arms. “I don’t know; I just wanted to, I guess.”

“Oh? You mean, like… as a bonding thing?”

“Yeah,” she mumbled. “Sorry.”

“Don’t apologize! That’s… really sweet, actually.” Dina eyed Ellie up, only to find her sheepishly ducking her gaze. She nudged her in the arm in response. “Seriously, please don’t be embarrassed. You’re trying to be a good mom. I think that’s pretty fucking cool.”

Ellie looked to the side, flattered, trying to suppress an awkward little blush and feeling her girlfriend staring at her. But Dina only stayed for a moment or two, stroking JJ on the arm again before turning away. As she left the bedroom, Ellie followed close behind, hoisting the baby up against her shoulder again as she descended the steps outside.

“I have a proposition for you,” Dina declared as she stepped into the living room, turning on her heel to face the bottom of the staircase.

“I’m listening.”

“Red wine is supposed to pair well with lamb, right? So, I broke out that bottle of Chateau-whatever that Adrian gave us.”

“You said you wanted to save that for a special occasion.”

“Yeah, I know. But I feel like getting drunk. Let’s have a nice dinner and just relax tonight.” She craned her neck to the side, gesturing to the wine in question, which she’d already taken the liberty of setting out on the table. “Few glasses of wine? What do you say?”

Ellie hugged JJ close. “That doesn’t sound very responsible.”

Dina just rolled her eyes. “Well, yeah, okay; obviously I’m not saying, like, _board game night_ drunk. Just… classy drunk. I feel like having a little fun.”

“There is no version of you that gets ‘classy drunk’. You are, like, the least classy drunk person I know.”

“Oh, fuck you!”

“You know I’m right.”

“Fuck you anyway.”

They met in the living room and then broke apart, Ellie heading for the record player while Dina returned to the frying pan on the stovetop.

Ellie wasn’t lying; she really could smell dinner cooking from all the way upstairs – and it really did smell pretty spectacular.

She propped up JJ with one hand as she took the disc out of the record player, mumbling close to his ear, “She’s just a little bitter ‘cause she can’t handle her booze.”

“Okay, I resent that,” Dina retaliated. “I could drink your lightweight ass under the table, and we both know it.”

Ellie closed her eyes, conspicuously ignoring it. “ _Bitter_ ,” she whispered to JJ again, very much still loud enough to be heard across the room.

“You are weaponizing our baby, and I do not approve.”

“I’m not weaponizing him. He just happens to be on my side. About everything. All the time. That’s not _my_ fault.”

“How do you know that?”

“I speak Potato. It’s a very exclusive language. You wouldn’t know it.”

“That’s very convenient for you.”

“I agree. It is.”

Smiling unapologetically, Ellie slumped down into a chair at the dinner table, but the movement startled JJ, leaving him wriggling restlessly in her arms. She stroked his back to relax him as she settled into her seat, squinting suspiciously at the fancy bottle of wine Dina had gotten out.

“It’s weird that Adrian gave us this,” she said. “Don’t you think that’s weird? Most people gave us, like, baby clothes. What’s he trying to say with this?”

Dina glanced back from the kitchen counter. “I think he wanted to give something valuable. Maria guilt-tripped him ‘cause of that thing with Seth at the barbeque. Remember that?”

“Oh, that? That wasn’t his fault. It’s not like he was trying to take Seth’s side. He was just trying to stop a fight from breaking out. Adrian’s always been like that.”

“Yeah, you don’t have to tell me. But Maria’s a little protective of us sometimes. Or… of you, at least.”

The thought of that made Ellie do a little double take. “You think Maria’s protective of me?”

“You don’t?”

“I don’t know,” she replied with a troubled shrug. “She’s protective of everyone, especially the people she knew when they were kids. But not me, like, in particular.”

“Yeah, she’s protective of everyone to _some_ extent, but you…”

“But I what?”

“Well… y’know.” Dina was reluctant to say it. “… _Tommy_ feels protective of you. So, I think she does, too, because of that.”

“Oh,” Ellie mumbled, put off. “I guess.”

As they spoke, the young amateur chef finished up her business at the stove and moved the meat to a rack on the counter. Then she dug around in one of the cabinets for something.

Before Ellie saw what she was up to, Dina had already returned to the kitchen table with a pair of whiskey glasses, taking her seat in the chair perpendicular to Ellie’s. Then she started pouring.

Ellie watched carefully. “I thought you wanted to have this with dinner.”

“The cookbook says to let the meat rest for ten minutes. We’ll eat soon enough. Nothing wrong with having a drink first.”

Two fingers pushed Ellie’s glass over to the edge of the table.

Ellie stared without touching it. A little bit of red entered her cheeks. “…What is this?”

Dina’s fingers curled around her glass. “I guess it’s a special occasion.”

“Is this, like – are we on a date?”

They exchanged a glance.

“Well, don’t sound so scandalized!” Dina raised both eyebrows and took a small sip. That apparently settled it.

Ellie mulled it over. “Is there something I’m not remembering? This isn’t, like, a Jewish holiday or something, is it? Is it Yom Kippur? What’s the one I always forget?”

“Yom Kippur is in September. It’s the one that comes after Rosh Hashanah. And it’s supposed to be a day of fasting; it would be kind of tasteless to celebrate it by getting wasted.”

“So you’re saying we _are_ getting wasted.”

“ _Classy_ wasted,” she corrected. “I already told you. I just want to have some fun. We could use a break, don’t you think? We deserve it.”

Her finger rapped along the side of her glass as she studied Ellie’s face. Ellie puffed out her cheeks as she pretended to consider it. She really _could_ use a break, though she hadn’t thought about it.

“What do you think, spud? You wanna party?” Pushing her chair back, she lifted JJ up to her face, nuzzling their cheeks together as she cooed at him. He was still half asleep, and simply wriggled in response, and so Ellie quickly lowered him again, shooting a look straight up and returning to her adult voice. “He says he’s ready to get fucked up.”

“I’m so proud.”

Happy to have her on board, Dina raised her glass to her lips again, and Ellie watched her for a minute before reaching for her own, maneuvering awkwardly around JJ to grab it with one hand and take a sip.

It was mild. A little sweet. Probably expensive. Ellie hadn’t drunk much expensive alcohol; there wasn’t really much of a concept of that back in Jackson. People would drink whatever they could get their hands on, just like everywhere else.

“Do you remember…?” Dina smacked her lips, eyes still focused on the woman across from her. “Do you remember… that time that Jesse stole a box of wine, and I accidentally dropped it on his bedroom floor and spilled it all over his carpet?”

Ellie narrowed her eyes immediately, surprised to hear her bring it up. “If you’re talking about the time you ran, like, five blocks in your bare feet so you could hide out at my place, then yeah. I remember that.”

Dina chuckled as she recalled it. “Jesse got all intense about it. He was acting like he was jumping on a grenade for me by taking the fall for it with his parents.”

“He was funny.”

“He was just worried his mom was gonna think I was a bad influence.”

“You _were_ a bad influence.”

“That’s enough out of you.”

“Listen,” said Ellie with a click of her tongue, “What _I_ remember is, you lying down next to where I was sitting on my bed, and going on and on for like five straight minutes about how cool you thought my posters were. And I remember thinking at the time, I knew for a fact that you didn’t listen to Thoughts Twenty.” She got a little more energized as she explained, shifting forward in her seat to move closer in. “I was really worried Cat was gonna show up. Or, y’know, that you were gonna puke in my sheets. I was nervous about it all night.”

“You were crushing on me pretty hard.”

Ellie lingered on the thought, glancing to the side with very slight embarrassment. “Duh.” She scratched the back of her neck, shrugging. “Can you blame me? You were drunk. You flirt when you get drunk. I stand by what I said before.”

Dina shrugged back. “Was a fun night, though.”

“Yeah. It was.”

Ellie had always thought of that memory as one of the many times she should have said something different to Dina while she had the chance. And yet, there she was, sitting at their kitchen table. Holding their son in her arms.

It sometimes slipped by her just how surreal it all was. 

“Okay,” Dina sighed, gesturing to Ellie with her glass. “Your turn.”

“My turn?” Ellie’s eyes went wide. “Okay. Uh… alright, do you remember…?” She expected to have to scour her memory for something good, but to her own surprise, something pleasant, albeit vague, came to her almost immediately. “…Uh, okay. I think this was – it might actually have been the first time we ever went on a paired patrol together. And we got jumped by –”

“No.”

“No, you don’t remember?”

“No, you’re thinking of the second time we went on a paired patrol. We didn’t run into any infected the first time.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah. You’re thinking of the second time. When Shimmer got scared off into the woods and got caught in a bush.”

“Okay. Well, the second time, then.” Ellie blinked. “Shit, I feel like I can’t use that one now! Clearly you remember it better than I do.”

“No, no, go on. I’m curious what you thought was memorable about it.”

“Just something you did that I liked.”

“…Well, okay, don’t leave me in suspense.”

She hesitated. “…Is the lamb still resting?”

“ _Ellie_.”

“Fine,” she groaned. “But don’t laugh at me if I misremember it.”

“Oh, I will.”

Ellie’s eyes nearly rolled back into her head, but she proceeded anyway. “What I was remembering was, we got really thrown by the infected, and we ended up taking way longer than we were supposed to on our route. And when we got back, Joel was waiting for us, and he came over and freaked out about whether I was okay.” She leaned back in her chair, allowing herself to get a little absorbed in the memory. “And… you could tell I was annoyed with him, so you made up this whole story about how you ran off and got us lost, just so he would leave us alone.” She shot an expectant look at Dina. “Am I remembering this right?”

“I think so.”

“But he didn’t actually leave us alone. He just got annoyed with _you_ , instead. He went off on this whole rant about how when he doesn’t know where we are, he feels like he has to assume the worst, and he doesn’t know what to do. And by the end of it he’d pretty much stopped talking to you and was just yelling at me again about how I need to be more careful…”

As she trailed off, it slowly occurred to Ellie that Dina’s expression had shifted from playful curiosity to something rapt, and sentimental. She was thrown for a second.

“What?” Getting nothing, she threw up a hand, repeating herself sharply: “ _What_?”

Dina just shook her head and smiled. “Nothing. That’s a good one.”

Ellie reached out to take a drink, but she never broke eye contact.

There always seemed to be something Dina wasn’t saying. They both spent a while just sitting there at the table, very loudly not saying it.

Ellie was tired of that. “Sorry for freaking you out yesterday.”

Dina’s expression didn’t change at all. “You didn’t freak me out.”

“Just… talking about Jesse’s parents. It got me a little worked up. I don’t know why. I was trying to keep it to myself; I didn’t want it to be a big thing.”

“It’s fine, seriously. You didn’t freak me out. Don’t apologize for how you feel.”

“I know. And you say that, but I just.” Ellie fidgeted with her hands, holding JJ close, searching frantically for a way to explain herself without putting Dina on the spot. “You’re so patient with me all the time, and I don’t want you to feel like I don’t care about your needs, because I know it’s hard for you, too, sometimes, and I just – that’s really important to me, because the last thing I want is to be some kind of, like, emotional burden on –”

“ _Hey_.” A stern frown cut her off. “Don’t use that word. Okay? Don’t ever use that word with me. Please.”

“I know. I know.”

“I just suggested this because I wanted to have some fun. Like I said.” Dina leaned her elbows on the table, and she reached one hand out to rest it on Ellie’s, her forefinger tracing along the back of her wrist. “I thought we could use a break. And I like talking to you. That’s all.”

She watched closely for a response.

A few replies ran through Ellie’s head – and with a hint of uncertainty, she settled on the easiest one. “Well. I always feel like I need a few drinks before I talk to _you_ , so I guess it works out.”

Immediately, Dina released her hand, sliding back in her seat and snorting, “Oh, stop! I’m trying to be serious here.”

Ellie laughed at her.

She opened her mouth to say something.

A garage door slammed shut, and then she forgot it.

Her eyes darted straight up. They were still adjusting to the dark.

Then she realized how cold she was.

Priya had taken her somewhere. A little auto shop in a little abandoned town.

She slumped to her side. She was seated on the concrete. Her palm dug into it, freezing.

There were voices echoing from the other side of the building.

Priya’s voice, she recognized first: “Left her behind so I could circle back around. She’s not in good enough shape to move around on her own. I’m worried she’s going to collapse from blood loss.”

Then another voice. A man’s voice that she had never heard before. “This isn’t a great place for a hideout.”

Their bodies appeared as silhouettes in the doorway, becoming easier to make out as they approached Ellie’s spot in the center of the room. The man stood a head taller than Priya. There were bags under his eyes.

“I know,” said Priya. “We’re too exposed. We need to move out soon. Get some distance.”

“That’s exactly what I’m saying. They’re going to move through here soon. We’ve got to get her the hell out.” The man stood over Ellie with his arms crossed. “Jesus. Looks like they almost killed her.”

“Let’s _hope_ it’s ‘almost’. There isn’t very much I can do for her unless the others come back with some better supplies.” She looked back and forth between the man at her side and the woman bleeding out on the floor. “For now, we’re just going to have to hope she’s as tough as the old man says she is.”

“I’m not sure this was a good idea. We have our own people to worry about.”

“Well, did you want me to just leave her? I mean, _look_ at her!”

“No – I don’t know.”

“She’d never have made it on her own. She’s barely hanging on as it is. They’d rip her to pieces.”

“I get that. I’m just saying, it’s not going to be easy getting everyone out of here.”

“They picked her up from the highway, same as us. I’m not doing this because it’s easy, are you?”

Priya didn’t wait for a response, brushing past him to get down on one knee, putting herself at eye level with Ellie, whose gaze was stuck on a small black spot on the floor.

“Hey, Ellie?”

“Yeah.” Her eyelids drooped.

Priya tapped her on the arm to get her attention. “You’re awake? You heard me talking?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay. The others are making their way around. How are you holding up?”

“I’m fine.”

“I hope so. Because we’re going to need to move again. Are you going to be able to do that?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. Good. I’m going to hold you to that.” Priya nodded firmly to herself, but a grunt from the man standing behind her made her hesitate, and she looked back over her shoulder with gritted teeth. “Alright… I don’t want to do this, but I’m going to need to ask you to bear with me just a little longer. We’ve got a few other people we need to meet up with at another building nearby. They might have some medical supplies. Alex and I are going to go get them, and then we’ll bring them back here. Then we’ll all move out together, as a group. Sound good?”

“Nnn,” Ellie breathed.

Her head throbbed again. She could feel her hair sticking to her forehead.

It was so cold.

“Priya, we need to fucking move,” said the man.

Priya nodded without looking up, focusing unflinchingly forward. “We’ll be back soon. Hold on, Ellie. Just hold on.” Her voice took on a slightly warm, slightly familiar tone, just for a second. Ellie did not quite have the strength to smile at it.

The man offered a hand to help Priya to her feet, but she rejected it, pushing herself up on her own. Neither of them said another word to Ellie again before leaving.

Their footsteps seemed to go on for a long time, growing fainter and fainter as they reached the exit of the shop. The garage door rattled open.

Very faintly, from the other end of the building, Ellie heard the man’s voice echoing one last time. “She’s not gonna make it.”

Then the garage door slammed shut again.

She pressed her hands into her chest. Her blood was all dried on her skin. Priya had apparently wrapped some cloth around her wounds to hold her over, but they were all soaked through. She took a loud, deep, painful breath.

And then she curled up on the floor, touched her fingers to her bracelet, and closed her eyes, alone again.

* * *

In the middle of the afternoon, deep in the woods outside the farm, Ellie came face-to-face with the buck again. The same one she’d been sketching; she was sure of it. There was something about the way it looked at her.

She made up her mind then. The next day, she headed out with Dina (and JJ, wrapped up against her in his sling) in tow to hunt for it.

She took the lead through the brush with a rifle around her shoulder, and Dina followed along behind, slowly but surely, cradling the baby.

“I’m not crazy about going this far out with him…” Dina said with a frown, pushing a low-hanging branch out of her face.

“Well, I can’t haul it all the way back to the house by myself.” Ellie peered off into the distance, visualizing the deer’s path, before turning back to the pair of them. “It’s okay. A little fresh air is good for him. Right, buddy?” She reached a hand out to brush a few fingers through his hair, and he shifted gently against his sling, cooing.

Ellie and Dina caught each other fawning over him at the exact same time, and suddenly their smiles were directed toward each other, instead.

“One day, we’ll be teaching _him_ how to do this stuff,” Ellie said softly.

“Yeah. Weird…”

“Kinda awesome to think about, though.”

They paused, lingering affectionately on each other.

Before either could speak again, something rustled in the woods further out, and Ellie immediately turned away, reaching a hand to steady the rifle slung around her shoulder.

As she headed out, she heard Dina sigh under her breath.

“Do you think it will be much further?”

“Nah. You saw the tracks; it’ll be around here…”

“I’m just wondering… I mean… are you sure you want to do this? We have sheep in the barn. We’re not gonna starve.”

“I know that. But, trust me. It’ll be worth the trouble.”

“Just. My point is, if you’re really fascinated by this thing, don’t you worry you might regret killing it?”

Ellie stopped short and glanced back over her shoulder at the comment. “Oh, come on. You know me better than that. It’s just an animal. There’s nothing to worry about.”

“I guess.”

“Hey, do you not want to do this?” Ellie widened her eyes softly, gesturing back with one hand back where they came from. “We can turn back. It’s not a big deal.”

“No. It’s fine.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure.”

The rustling in the bushes was closer now. Neither of them had seen any tracks in a while, but they were definitely headed in the right direction. And so Ellie marched on.

Her eyes narrowed, scanning the treeline for antlers. The rustling came through, louder than she had expected, like it wasn’t trying to move away from them. It certainly wasn’t acting like a deer.

A second later, it burst out of the underbrush, and Ellie turned on a dime, green eyes wrenched open wide as plates.

“ _Dina!_ ”

Before the two knew what had happened, a clicker had stumbled out of cover and wrapped its arms tightly around Dina’s leg, screeching wildly. It was jarringly short, and its head only went up to her waist, teeth gnashing an inch from JJ’s sling.

“Shit! Shit!” One of Dina’s arms cupped the baby protectively, and she stumbled to the side, leg flailing to shake off the small infected. It gave way easily, and she kicked it to the ground, her free hand scrambling for the pistol holster on her leg. Then she pinned it with her foot, firing three shots directly into its fungus-covered face until it finally fell still. “Fuck me…!”

Ellie’s hands were already clutching the rifle, but she hadn’t managed to line up a safe shot before Dina had finished the job herself. “Dina… are you okay…? Did you…?”

“I’m clean. We’re both clean…” she breathed, tucking her pistol back into its holster and feeling at her leg over her pants. After a second to collect her thoughts, she straightened both her hands around the baby’s sling and shot a harsh look in her girlfriend’s direction. “ _Fuck,_ Ellie! You told me you cleared this area!” JJ was bawling in her arms, now, shaken by the gunshots and his mother’s panicked breathing. She cradled him with both hands, trying to steady herself as she cooed, “I know, baby; I know… Mama’s here… it’s okay…”

Ellie was nearly as shaken as Dina was. Her hands trembled as she slung the rifle back around her shoulder. “I did! I swear, I did! I triple checked it! This thing must have _just_ wandered in.” She exhaled loudly, looking over the corpse of the dead infected. “Oh, _fuck_ …!” She paced in a small circle around the body, hands fidgeting, and tried not to hyperventilate. “I’m sorry… I’m sorry; I sh – should have…”

JJ’s crying was painful to listen to. Dina buried him in her chest, kissing him gently on the top of his head. “I know, baby. That was scary. We’re safe now. Mama’s here…” She carried him to a fallen tree trunk and took a seat, whispering softly into his ear to comfort him.

She looked up. Ellie had a hand on her chest, struggling to get her breathing under control, with panic in her eyes.

“…Hey. Ellie. It’s okay, babe. Shit happens. We just need to be more careful next time.”

“Yeah… I know…”

JJ’s crying had waned to a gentle gurgle by now. Dina rocked him, but now her eyes were fixed on her girlfriend instead, concerned all over again. Ellie was all too aware of that.

Shuffling around on the ground, she eventually made her way over to the corpse of the clicker, hovering over it.

Dina frowned. “It’s small…”

Ellie extended her leg to flip the body over with her foot, getting a better look at its back. It was wearing a tiny, baby-blue backpack, covered in faded stickers of cartoon characters. She knelt in the dirt to pull it off – it was stuck to the clicker’s body, with fungus growing over the straps. Pinning her knee to the small of its back, though, she was able to wrench it off.

“Bag’s light.” Ellie shook it in one hand as she stood up again. On closer inspection, there was a label pasted to the back pouch of the pack. She read aloud: “‘Kaylie. Blue team. If found: call sign KE7NFF.’ God…”

“KE7NFF…” Dina repeated. “Well, she’s not from Jackson. That’s a relief, at least…”

“She’s a clicker, so wherever she’s from, she must have gone missing a long time ago.” Ellie took a step away from Dina, raising a hand to unzip the bag. “D’you think we should we radio them…?”

“It’s worth a shot. We can bring it up with Jesse’s parents next time they stop by. Get a message out from the city.”

Ellie turned over the backpack and shook its contents out into the dirt: a pistol, a half-eaten bag of dried fruit, a stuffed rabbit, a coloring book, and a pile of dull crayons.

No wonder it was light.

“Oh, man…”

She reeled back like she’d been punched. It set in all at once.

A little girl. Kaylie.

Suddenly, it was difficult to stand. So she slumped down onto the ground, resting her back against the nearest tree.

Dina was still staring at her. Giving her that look.

Ellie’s chest seized up. The two of them made eye contact. JJ shuffled against his mother’s chest, grasping at the collar of her shirt. Ellie stared at them, gasping for breath.

Ellie stared at them, and she was in Salt Lake City. And the rapids were thundering against the bus down below, and Joel was reaching for the glass underneath her, yelling at her to take his hand, trying desperately not to lose her. And she fell beneath the waves, and the water filled her lungs, and he disappeared from her vision.

‘Everything happens for a reason.’

Ellie stared off into the woods, past where she’d found the tracks of that deer, where she was sure it was still wandering around. And she was in a coal mine in Colorado, standing over the body of a bloater that had nearly killed her. And then she was standing beside David on the bridge, staring off into the snow, excited to tell Joel what she’d found for the two of them. He was waiting for her.

‘What we do matters.’

Ellie stared at the clicker. The infection-riddled corpse of the little girl who had died for no reason. And she was in the chalet outside Jackson. And the body was Joel’s, and blood was oozing from his face, and he was staring back at her. He was using the last little flicker of life in his shattered body just to stare back in her direction. Too far gone to recognize her.

Her skin was burning.

“Ellie. Look at me. Breathe, okay?”

Dina’s hand rested on her shoulder, and she winced, and she was in the woods outside the farm again.

Dina was still hovering there, speaking softly. “Are you okay? Please talk to me.”

Ellie cupped her hands. Her head felt heavy. She looked at the moth on her arm.

“I don’t want to keep secrets from you,” she mumbled, not looking up.

Dina hesitated. “What? What do you mean…?”

“There’s something I –” A lump formed in her throat, and she stopped herself, forcing herself to speak up. “I want you to know something. I… I shouldn’t have kept it from you. But I need you to promise you won’t think any differently of me after I tell you.”

“ _Ellie_ …!”

Just the suggestion of that obviously hurt her feelings, but Ellie pushed through it.

“I mean it. I want you to promise.”

A little incredulous, Dina took her hand off Ellie’s shoulder and wandered a few steps away, cradling JJ with some concern. “Okay. Fine. I… I promise. What…?”

Ellie drummed a fist against her knee. She’d gotten her promise, but she had a hard time believing it.

Nevertheless, she forced the words out. “I never told you why the WLF killed Joel.”

Dina froze. The subject had always bothered her.

She responded slowly. “Yes… you did. They’re Fireflies that Joel crossed. You told me they had a disagreement about smuggled goods.” She leaned down slightly, adding, almost fearfully, “Ellie… is that not true…?”

Ellie finally looked up again. “Do you know how I met him? How I ended up in Jackson in the first place?”

“You said Marlene hired him to smuggle you out of Boston after you got bitten. You wouldn’t have been safe there, not if you showed up as infected on their scanners. That’s why you went looking for Tommy.”

“Marlene had me smuggled out of Boston so we could meet up with the Fireflies. _That’s_ why we went looking for Tommy. We thought he would know where to find them, since he used to be one.”

“I… I don’t understand…”

“We needed to find the Fireflies, because Marlene believed they could use my immunity to make a vaccine.”

A vaccine – Dina silently repeated the words back to herself.

“…But you stayed in Jackson instead?”

“No. We found them. At a hospital in Salt Lake City.” She chewed on the edge of her tongue, fully aware of the fact that this was her last chance not to say it. “I was under the whole time. But it turns out, in order to do what they needed to do, the surgery would have killed me. So… Joel killed _them_ instead. He took me out of there. And he took me back to Jackson. And he lied to me about it.” By the time she finished explaining, her voice had lowered to a feeble whisper. “And if that had never happened, the world would have a vaccine right now.”

The weight of that wasn’t lost on either of them. Dina looked like she’d seen a ghost.

She paced back and forth in the dirt, raising a hand to her forehead, processing. “…Holy shit…”

“Do… do you remember the time I ran away? A few years ago?”

That was something they had never talked about much. Ellie knew it was always something Dina had wondered about – at least now she could finally get an explanation. It should have felt like more of a relief than it did.

“Uh… yeah,” Dina mumbled, suddenly intensely curious. “You were acting all weird the day before. Joel went out riding after you. That… that was…?”

“That was when I went back to the hospital. And I finally learned what happened.”

“It always seemed like things were different between you and him after that.”

“They were.”

Ellie didn’t know where to look. She didn’t know what to do with her hands. She scratched at her arms, trying to ignore the burning.

Dina kept on trying to limply reassure her. “Ellie… it’s not your fault. Whatever Joel did… it doesn’t matter. You aren’t responsible for his choices.”

“That’s not the point,” Ellie said dourly. “All that shit he and I did. The shit we went through together. The endless trail of bodies, and… and now he’s dead. All of that, and now he’s just fucking dead anyway.” She threw up her hands. “And Abby gets to live.”

The mere mention of that name made Dina wince. Ellie had known it would; she was past caring. It needed to be said.

“Ellie…” Dina started. “I… I can’t even imagine what this must be like for you. I’m so sorry. But –”

“But _what_?” Ellie gripped her wrist so tight it turned red. “Everything that I’ve been through to get here, Dina, and what do I have to fucking show for it?”

Dina was taken aback by the severity of the question. She looked hurt all of a sudden.

JJ shifted uncomfortably in her arms, and she glanced down at him for a moment, wrapping an arm around him from underneath.

Then she looked straight up again. “What about me?”

Ellie looked right at her, right into her eyes, and scoffed.

“What _about_ you?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Everyone still with me? Apologies for the long delay; this is an extra-long chapter, and my creative gears sometimes turn very slowly. There are... well, needless to say, a lot of different feelings happening in this one, and I struggled with parts of it for quite a while.
> 
> I've been reading a lot of fanfiction here lately, and I can certainly say, I feel no less intimidated than I did starting out posting this considering the incredible talent of the writers in this community. That said, I'm actually quite happy with how this chapter turned out and I'm really looking forward to moving forward with some of the concepts I have for this story. I really appreciate all the comments so far, and thanks as always to everyone for reading. :)


	7. Skin and Bone

A crowd huddled around a campfire at the edges of Ellie’s blurred vision. Someone had draped a blanket over her shoulders. For a second, she could have sworn she was at a bonfire in Jackson, sleeping on the grass. She half-expected music to start playing.

The fantasy didn’t last long. The crowd was small, and their voices were hushed and fearful. The fire was smoldering.

As she pulled herself off the ground to sit up, her body reminded her what it was doing there in the first place. Her head throbbed like there was a spike through it, and she pressed her palm against her stinging brow with an audible groan. The roots of her hair, tickling the tips of her fingers, were hard with dried blood.

Only one person even reacted to Ellie’s movement. A short, pallid woman squatting by the campfire, gnawing on a piece of meat. Priya had looked too skinny, but this woman was something else entirely. A skeleton wrapped in a meager layer of skin. Her t-shirt looked child-sized, and yet the sleeves still hung from her arms like they were two sizes too large.

Her eyes darted to the side from the sound of Ellie shifting around, but she didn’t even look up from her food, just grunting, “She’s awake.”

The other figures around the campfire shifted suddenly. As the person in front of Ellie turned, the dim orange glow of the fire light cast over her face, and she recoiled from it slightly.

One of the faces that turned to look at her made her wonder if she was hallucinating.

Her mouth hung slightly open. “Ben…?”

“Ellie? Thank goodness you’re okay…”

Her palm rested on the ground behind her, and the whole weight of her body fell back on it. The figures around the fire shuffled around a bit more, and Ben moved to stand, only to be immediately cut off by the woman beside him.

“Here, here. Let’s try not to overwhelm her. Give me a minute with her.”

“Okay, okay…”

It was Priya, sliding awkwardly around the others to move to Ellie’s side of the campfire. Her face was partly obscured in the dark.

Ellie wasn’t sure how she even remembered that name. Her memory of the woman was foggy, but distantly pleasant, in a way that didn’t seem quite real…

Priya moved to kneel in the dirt in front of Ellie, resting a hand on the torn knee of her blue jeans. Ellie’s pupils lost their focus.

“How are you feeling, Ellie?”

Ellie sincerely considered it for a minute. A dozen awful sensations were fighting for dominance all over her body.

She settled on, “I think I pissed my pants.”

The woman kneeling in front of her gave a single, severe nod. “You probably did. You had a seizure.”

“I _did_?” Ellie craned her neck to make eye contact, though it strained her.

“You suffered serious head trauma. There’s no way for me to properly diagnose you under these conditions, but judging by your wounds, I can only guess that it’s a pretty severe brain injury.” Priya lowered herself slightly, studying Ellie’s body language with raised eyebrows. “That said, the fact that you seem to be lucid enough to carry on a conversation at this stage is a very, very good sign. You’ve been on and off for a few days now.”

“Oh, fuck; a few days…?”

“Is that a surprise? You didn’t realize that much time had passed?”

“No… a few days…? Where are we?”

“It’s alright. Some short-term memory loss is normal in your situation. It’s not anything to panic about, under the circumstances.” Priya looked back over her shoulder toward the outskirts of their camp. “We’re a few miles outside town. We’re as far from their patrol routes as we could get. We’re going to be moving out again at sunrise. Think you can manage that?”

Ellie’s eyes drifted. They had apparently set up in some small clearing in the woods. There was only a small handful of them around the fire, which struck her as odd. Reaching for her memory of the past couple of days, she seemed to recall there being more of them.

She watched the emaciated woman eat, ripping off hunks of meat with her bare hands and stuffing them violently into her mouth. It had been a while since Ellie had seen anyone that was genuinely starving. The sight was gut-wrenching.

Priya’s voice rang in her ears. “…Ellie?”

Her gaze didn’t waver. “Yeah?”

“Still with me?”

“Yeah.”

“Why don’t you tell me what you remember about what happened to you?”

“Uh…” Ellie ran a hand over her face.

A flash of red – cool air, freezing concrete. That awful look in the hunter’s eyes as he stared down the barrel of her gun.

“A pipe,” she grumbled. “He… uh… one of the hunters took a pipe and beat in me in face with it. A couple of times. And he stabbed me in the chest with my knife. That’s all I really remember.”

“Yeah, that checks out. I’m worried about a skull fracture, but there honestly isn’t very much we can do about it right now.” Priya cocked her head to the side as she explained, monitoring Ellie up close. “Try not to move your head or neck more than you need to. I know this isn’t really possible under the circumstances, but to the extent that you’re able to, you need to avoid exerting yourself, okay? And try not to sleep without supervision. If anything about your condition changes, I need to be able to catch it.”

Someone else was watching the starving woman eat, too. A thin, bruised, curly-haired man with his arm in a sling. He’d barely looked in Ellie’s direction since she’d awoken.

Priya’s voice rang in her ears again: “Did you hear me?”

“Uh huh.”

“What did I say?”

Ellie sighed under her breath. “You said not to sleep without supervision.”

“Good, good.” Priya slid a little closer, watching impatiently for a reaction. “So, I’ve been doing my best to tend to your bandages, but you’ve been a little… skittish about being touched. Now that I have your full attention, I’m going to want to change them soon. I’m worried that your stitches may have come loose after the convulsions.”

“Stitches…?”

“You don’t remember that, either?”

“No.”

“Okay. That’s okay…” Priya scratched her chin, leaning back to examine Ellie up and down. “So… you have a few sets of stitches. But they’re rough, because I had to do them in a hurry. One along your brow, which split open, and one on your left breast, which suffered a deep puncture wound. Fortunately, it doesn’t seem like any vital organs were hit, but you’ve still lost a lot of blood. I bandaged up your chest, your head, and your leg, where you were shot. But there are no stitches on that one. It wasn’t very deep, so I just cleaned it as best I could and wrapped it up. Are you with me so far?”

“Yeah.”

“Do you have any questions for me?”

Ellie blinked. “Why are you doing this?”

Priya didn’t even entertain it. “ _Medical_ questions.”

She rubbed a hand over her face. “What about, ‘how do I look?’”

“Tsch. Close enough, I guess,” said Priya with a shrug. “To be frank, you look like roadkill at the moment. But you just need time to heal.” She raised a hand in response to Ellie’s sudden look of concern. “Don’t worry; you’ll always have your… angelic, high cheekbones. As long as we make sure your nose heals properly, all you’re going to have to get used to is a few more scars. But I’ve seen you with your shirt off; I don’t think that’s going to be a huge adjustment for you.”

“Fair enough.”

Ellie felt a hand under her shirt at the bandages swathed around her chest. They felt like the only thing holding her together at the moment; she could still feel all the tears in her skin threatening to come apart. It wasn’t a new feeling for her.

Priya gave her another minute before continuing. “You haven’t been speaking much the past few days, up until now. Do you remember much about our group?”

“No.”

“Alright. Well, in case you forgot, I’m Priya. You already know Ben…” As she explained, she sat back in the dirt, gesturing a hand over to the starving woman, who didn’t react, then to the curly-haired man across from her, who offered a meek wave. “This is Gretchen, and Wyatt,” she murmured, leaning back to point toward a blanket-covered lump on the ground, “and Andrea’s the one still asleep there. And then we have four others out scavenging right now. One of them’s Alex; you remember him? He helped me move you out of the auto shop we holed up in.”

Ellie squinted. “I think I remember that… what the hell happened…?”

“We staged an escape from the hunters’ compound. We’d been planning it for a long time, but we couldn’t pin down a good window of opportunity.” Priya gave a humorless snicker, jabbing a thumb behind her. “And then, a couple days ago, after you guys got picked up, your friend Ben here drove a van through our perimeter fence. So we decided to take the chance and go for it. Alex busted into the armory, and… here we are.”

Ben shuffled in toward the campfire on cue, staring wide-eyed at Ellie with cupped hands. There was a little bandage across the bridge of his nose. He’d taken a beating from one of the hunters, or so she thought she remembered. The whole incident was a blur.

She pressed two fingers to her temple, eyes shut tight. “How’d you get the van back?”

“I followed them from the woods.” His voice was shaky. “They left their keys in the ignition at the checkpoint into their camp. Nobody saw me. I… don’t think they were expecting me to be bold enough to risk coming back.”

The whole incident was a blur – but one thing stuck out to her.

“That was stupid,” Ellie hissed. “You shouldn’t have come back for me. I told you, they only need one of us.” She gritted her teeth. “You could have gotten yourself killed.”

“Well, I didn’t, did I? Now we’re both alive because of it. And so are all these other people. God knows what would have happened to you if I’d left you behind…” The sound of him shuffling around got Ellie to open her eyes to look at him again. He pushed past Priya to dig around in the group’s pile of bedrolls and backpacks, and from the center of it, he dragged out Ellie’s bag, dropping it roughly beside her before returning to his seat at Priya’s side. “ _Here_ , by the way,” he sighed. “I pulled this out of the back of the van. They stripped all your guns off of it, but they didn’t get around to emptying it out.”

Ellie lifted it onto her lap. It was much lighter than before, unsurprisingly.

She’d barely opened it up to take a look before another thought occurred to her: “What about my revolver?”

Ben shook his head. “Gone. They still have it. All the guns were stripped off, like I said.”

“Oh…”

Hearing that stung more than she expected. For a single, fleeting second, she felt a pull to go back for it. To sneak into the camp and cut the throat of whatever hunter was carrying it.

Only for a second. But the impulse was cold, and familiar.

“Is it important?” Ben asked.

“Just sentimental. It doesn’t matter.”

Her hands shook.

She turned over the backpack and ran a hand down the back. Mercifully, the space shuttle pin was still there. So at least she still had _something_.

A hand dug around in the main pocket until it found her pencil and her journal – also untouched, thankfully.

Then she flipped open the front cover to find her list of names staring back at her.

Priya frowned with concern at the sight. “You should try not to read or write. Rest your brain. Don’t overexert yourself.”

Ellie just shook her head. “The one I killed. The one with long, black hair, with a bunch of tattoos on his arms. What was his name?”

The question made Priya hesitate. “Uh. That sounds like Shaun,” she mumbled, eyes narrowing. “Good fucking riddance.”

Ellie pressed pencil to paper. “Is that Shaun with a ‘U’ or a ‘W’?”

“Why do you care? Trust me, whatever you did to him, he deserved worse.”

“…Is it a ‘U’, or a ‘W’?”

She looked straight up, eyes burning with an intensity that took Priya completely off-guard.

“…Uh, a ‘U’, I think.”

‘Shaun’ was added to the bottom of the list.

The first person to die by Ellie’s hands since Santa Barbara.

It looked wrong on the page. She clenched her fist around her pencil to stop it trembling.

“Ellie? Everything okay?”

“Yeah.” Even after shutting the journal, she found herself fixating on the front cover. She could feel the others staring at her.

“Why don’t you eat something? You should get your strength up.”

“Fine.”

“Gretchen, can you…?”

The woman in question barely reacted to hearing her name called, just moving her foot to slide over a cast iron pot. Priya sighed almost inaudibly as she went digging inside it for food.

As she did, Wyatt spoke up suddenly, to the surprise of almost everyone else. “You should probably have some, too, Priya. I don’t think I’ve seen you eat all day.”

Priya exchanged a brief glance with him. “I don’t eat meat, dude.”

“Are you still on that?”

“I was never _off_ it!” She gave an exaggerated sigh, sliding back toward Ellie to offer a hunk of meat. “Here. It’s squirrel. Go nuts.”

She said it in such a deadpan that Ellie wasn’t even sure it was intentional, but the unexpected moment of levity earned a snort from her anyway as she accepted a piece of meat. “Nice.”

“Wow, you must really have head trauma if you thought _that_ was funny.”

“Trust me, you have no idea.”

She sank her teeth into it. Bloody, unseasoned, and almost completely flavorless. Food to stave off death and nothing else. Yet Ellie’s empty stomach was gnawing at her, and so somehow it was delicious anyway.

She could already feel some of the fog clearing from her head, at least enough to drum up some vague curiosity about the others.

“So,” she offered, tearing off another strip of meat with her teeth, “if you guys were all planning an escape for a while, then… how long were you, uh… captured… for?”

Her eyes darted from person to person. Each one of them looked away from her.

Wyatt offered up a quiet, “Eight months.” Gretchen didn’t even bother looking up.

Priya, herself taking a long while to offer up an answer, frowned painfully at her two companions. “I got picked up off the highway about two years ago. But all of us… well… the point is, their camp has been around for a long time. It’s been different for all of us.” She rubbed uncertainly at her forearm, eventually making eye contact with Ellie again.

It was, Ellie realized, probably too sensitive an issue to try and make small talk about, especially in her current state of delirium. But for some reason, even if only just her morbid curiosity, she pushed on with it anyway. She couldn’t take her eyes off of Gretchen, tracing her gaze over those morbid, bony features…

“And… where are you going to go now…?”

Priya jumped on it, hugging her arms to her chest. “Alex said he had family up in Oregon he wanted to go see. Other than that… I think the priority for most of the rest of us is just getting to safety. Brett, especially, is… persistent. We need to focus on putting distance between us and them. With the lengths they’ve gone to hunting down escapees in the past, it’s… not worth taking any risks.”

Wyatt shook his head. He was watching her, now.

“Albuquerque,” he grunted, first toward Priya, before looking back severely at Ellie. “Andrea says some smugglers there owe her a favor. They can get us into the zone. That’s our safest bet. And you guys should probably come, too, if you know what’s good for you.”

Something about that seemed excessively dark to her, but she shook it off.

As Wyatt explained, he shifted back in his seat, and some kind of sudden pain made him wince. He hugged his broken arm with gritted teeth, and suddenly Priya was hovering over him, doting.

“You good, man?”

He raised a weak hand. “I’m good. Just… hurts.”

“I can take a look.”

“I said I’m good.”

“Yeah, everyone wants to be the freakin’ tough guy.” Priya rolled her eyes.

Ellie caught herself smirking. “You’ve been getting a lot of this?”

“Nonstop. And you are no exception, lady. I can’t count how many times you told me you were fine while there was blood pouring out of your face like a water fountain.” She and Ellie locked eyes, and suddenly something seemed to occur to her, sparking a puzzling new change in expression. “…Speaking of which…”

“Speaking of which…?”

“Now that you’re feeling chatty. Maybe now would be a good time for you to share with the class a little bit.” She pointed down with two fingers. “That bite mark on your left hand…”

Ellie’s eyes shot downward immediately. Someone had stripped her gloves off; she hadn’t even noticed in all the commotion.

“Shit,” she hissed, almost inaudibly. “…It’s not what you think.”

“Ben says the two of you are immune. As in, immune to the cordyceps infection.” Priya’s voice was totally flat, with a measured, artificial sort of calm. “I found his bite when I checked him for injuries. And you both should have turned a long time ago, so I can only imagine there’s some truth to it.”

Ellie, exhausted, turned to Ben immediately. “…Really, dude?”

He threw up his hands defensively, shooting a look right back at her. “I can’t exactly put a glove over mine. What was I _supposed_ to say?”

They stared harshly at each other for a second.

Then Ellie, sighing, turned right back to Priya. “We’re looking for the –”

“Looking for the Fireflies.” Priya’s arms were crossed now. “I know. You’ve mentioned it several times, now. What, are they… are they looking for a cure, or something?”

“…Yeah. Yeah, that’s the idea. Back when I was a kid, they wanted to try and use me to make a cure, but everything went to shit, and they never got the chance. I figured, if they’re regrouping, then… now they’ve got two of us.”

Ben took the opportunity to chime in, too. “They’re based in Los Angeles. They’ve been sending out transmissions, looking for new recruits.”

Before Priya could respond, a laugh escaped from Gretchen, who still had her mouth full as she added, “What a load of shit.”

Ellie grimaced at her, but she still wasn’t looking. “Well, it’s _something_.”

Priya shrugged it off. Her attention was elsewhere. “I feel like there’s always been one group or another looking for a cure, but I’ve never once heard of anyone making any actual headway. You really think the Fireflies could do it…?”

“They had it in the palm of their hand.”

She barely mumbled it. Her head throbbed, and she was drifting again – she found herself staring at the backpack in the dirt beside her, focusing on the space shuttle pin. With every breath, she could feel her chest heaving.

Her eyes flitted up to meet Priya’s, but she was lost in thought.

Ellie tightened a grimy hand around her knee, head throbbing. “What…?”

She knew full well what she was about to hear.

“If you guys are headed to Los Angeles… would you take a third?”

Everyone went quiet. Somewhere in the back, Gretchen sighed, “Here we go…”

Priya didn’t turn back to look. She and Ellie were focused solely on each other now.

Ellie steeled herself. “You don’t want to do that.”

“I think I might.”

“You _don’t_. The Fireflies don’t fuck around, Priya.”

“Neither do I,” she replied, unfazed. “Look, maybe I can help them. If the plan is for the Fireflies to use your guys’ immunity to develop a vaccine, I bet they can use me, too.”

“You’re not…”

Priya skidded closer in the dirt. Ben hovered slightly behind her, but she focused entirely on Ellie as she explained. “Let me tell you a story. Okay? You wouldn’t know it from what we’ve been through the past few days, but my background isn’t in trauma surgery, or emergency care, or anything. I’m actually certified as a pathologist. And I did my residency at a FEDRA site up in Washington D.C. The Cordyceps Exposure Research Center; we called it FEDRA-CERC. At the time, it was the cordyceps research capital of the world. At our peak, we had almost two thousand people working there.” She clenched her fist severely. Her frustration was boiling closer to the surface the more she thought back on it. “And then ten years ago, still waiting on a breakthrough, FEDRA unilaterally decides, all that funding would be better served bolstering the zones. And they confiscate all our equipment. Reassign all our personnel. And today that site – a site that used to do cutting-edge medical research – is being used to develop hellfire missiles for the fucking military.” She slid back, further from Ellie, sweeping a hand all around her with a dramatic flair. “If we had someone like you – like either of you – back then, who knows what might have been possible? If the Fireflies are making it happen, I want to be a part of that. This might be the only chance I ever get. Maybe I ran into you guys for a reason.”

Ben peered at Ellie from behind her, over her shoulder. He was looking to her for confirmation almost as much as Priya was. Something on his face – guilt, or fear…

Ellie winced as another twinge of pain shot through her. “Can you pull your own weight?”

“What? Yes!”

“Then, fine. I don’t give a shit. Come if you want.”

Priya, more than anything, just seemed surprised to hear it. But she was invigorated, in a way that reminded Ellie a little of herself. Her fingers dug tighter against the fabric of her jeans as she clutched at her own knee.

In the back, leaning down to dig around for another helping of meat, Gretchen let out another wry, unashamed laugh. “Priya, I’m just gonna say this once. You’re a fucking _sucker_.”

“Yeah, well. What else is new?” Not offended in the least, Priya responded with an instant chuckle, this time peering back over her shoulder to ask her friend, “You guys gonna be okay heading to Albuquerque without me?”

“We’ll manage.”

“Great. It’s decided, then. In the morning, we’ll split up into groups. Alex can start his trip north. Everyone else can head west for Albuquerque,” she declared, “and me, Ellie, and Ben will loop around and start heading east.”

“We should find a place to hole up and rest, first,” Ben interjected softly. “Shouldn’t we, Priya? With Ellie in the shape she’s in…?”

“Yeah, that’s not a bad plan. We can take a few weeks and rest, stock up on supplies.”

Amongst all the idle chitchat that evening, that one comment suddenly broke through all the background noise, tearing through Ellie like a lightning bolt.

She sat up straight for the first time all night, surging with adrenaline. “ _Rest_? Are you kidding me? We’re not stopping now. We can’t be more than a few weeks from LA at this point. The Fireflies will have doctors. That’s the whole reason we’re doing this.”

Ben looked over for backup. “…Doc?”

Instantly, Priya threw her hands up, sliding back from the two of them. “Hey, don’t look at me. I’m not her mom. I don’t mind waiting, but I can’t make anybody do anything.”

Ellie’s ears rang.

She shot a glare at the old man. “Look, Ben, I don’t give a fuck what _you_ do. Go wherever you want. But I’m not stopping.”

“No, no,” he said, eyes lowering. “I’ll see this through to the end, I promise. I just don’t want you to push yourself harder than you should.”

“Why do you even _care_?”

She stared expectantly, but got nothing. He slumped back against the dirt, downcast. The fire crackled behind him, lighting up Gretchen’s face.

It was too hot. In Jackson, she would always sit further back from the fire, away from the crowd. And Dina and Jesse would always sit in the center, attracting all the attention. Ellie was drifting again; she could feel her eyelids fluttering.

Anxious to break the silence, Priya was the next one to say anything, after what felt like a long time. “Ellie, you’re not going to regret this. We could really make a difference, doing this together.”

She smacked her lips. “Yeah.”

Wyatt rubbed a hand over his face. It was purple in spots. Someone must have beaten him during the escape. He winced and cradled his broken arm again.

Blood trickled down Gretchen’s chin from the meat. It dribbled onto her clothes. She didn’t even notice.

Ellie closed her eyes. It had gotten so quiet without anyone speaking. All she could hear was people shifting around, and the chewing, and the fire crackling. She could smell the smoke, and she could feel the burning on her skin.

“Hang on a second,” she heard herself say, and then she opened her eyes again, silently repeating it to herself just to make sure she’d really said it. Everyone turned to look, but she just stared at the fire. “Guys,” she mumbled, “don’t… don’t go to a quarantine zone, alright? It’s miserable. And no smuggler will ever be able to get that many of you inside the walls anyway.” She breathed out a strained sigh, shuffling past Priya to move a little closer to the fire. “Do you have a map?”

For once, someone had Gretchen’s full attention. Every single conscious person around the campfire was suddenly intensely interested. Ben, especially, looked dumbfounded.

Within a minute, Priya had a map laid out in the dirt. Ellie leaned over it, the stubs of her missing fingers dragging along the page as she searched with her hand.

Her index finger pressed down on Wyoming. “…Here. Jackson County. There’s a city here. They have food and water, electricity, walls, armed patrols. Whatever you need. You’ll be safe there.”

“A whole city…?” Gretchen whispered.

“A whole city.”

“And they let in outsiders?”

“If you’re not a threat.” Ellie looked her in the eye. “Talk to their leader there, this woman named Maria. Blonde, middle-aged, kinda scary if you don’t know her… it’ll be easy to find her if you ask around. I’ll sign a note for you guys to bring her so you can prove I sent you. She’ll vouch for you.”

Gretchen snatched the map away, marking Jackson in the spot Ellie had pointed to. She, like everyone else, was stricken with disbelief.

“God damn…” she chuckled, shaking her head. “You’d really leave a place like that to go looking for the Fireflies, huh? You’re a bigger sucker than Priya.”

Ellie scratched at her forearm, working her way up to her wrist until she was fidgeting with her bracelet. She squinted in the firelight.

“I…” She swallowed, muscles tensing. “…I’m getting some sleep. Wake me up when we’re leaving.”

“Good,” said Priya. “I’ll watch you in case you have another episode.” She turned toward the crowd closest to the fire before adding, “The rest of you guys should think about getting some sleep, too. Big day tomorrow. Wait until the others hear about this…”

Ellie fell back against the dirt. She hugged her backpack close, resting her head against it. The others pored over the map chattering amongst themselves again.

Ben was ducking her gaze.

She shut her eyes tight. Eventually, the throbbing in her skull subsided. The others’ chattering quieted down as they settled in to rest.

The fire faded out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes, I'm still alive! My goal is definitely to post much more frequently than once a month, especially for not-especially-long chapters like this one. I really appreciate anyone who has the patience to put up with my inconsistent writing schedule. Between starting a new job last month, resolving to beat TLOU2 on permadeath (which I spent an embarrassingly long time on) and working on writing a little side-project companion piece to this fic (which I'll be putting out soon!) I spent a lot of time not working on this chapter. But I've already got a good amount of the next few chapters finished, so with any luck I will have those out soon, too!


End file.
